I visited one retrofit workshop run by a strict Mennonite. Marlin was a short beardless man (no beards for the Mennonites). He uses a horse and buggy, has no phone, but electricity runs in the shop behind his home. They use electricity to make pneumatic parts. Like most of his community, his kids work along side him. A few of his boys use a propane powered fork lift with metal wheels (no rubber so you can’t drive it on the road) to cart around stacks of heavy metal as they manufacture very precise milled metal parts for pneumatic motors and for kerosene cooking stoves, an Amish favorite. The tolerances needed are a thousand of an inch. So a few years ago they installed a massive, $400,000 computer-controlled milling (CNC) machine in his backyard, behind the horse stable. This massive half-million dollar tool is about the dimensions of a delivery truck. It is operated by his 14-year old daughter, in a bonnet. With this computer controlled machine she makes parts for grid-free horse and buggy living.

Anyone can enjoy this. The article goes on in-depth about the Amish air-hackers, trying to out-do one another with their pneumatic prowess. Thank rstevens of dieselsweeties fame for digging this up.

One clever Amish fellow spent a half hour telling me the igneous way he hacked up a mechanism to make a buggy turn signal automatically turn off when the turn was finished, just as it does in your car.

When civilization finishes crumbling as Depression 2.0 picks up steam, I’m heading to Amish country. These guys will be rebuilding from much fewer ashes much quicker than big cities, because they have much less to lose. I’ll loot some solar panels to have something to trade with them to help them run their simple machines. And really, what’s cooler than having something around called a phone shanty?

Tags: airpunk, only it's kinda anti-science with the amish, take that steampunks

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 20:48.