Negotiators from most of the countries of the world are right now beavering away in Paris, hopefully coming up with a plan to counter dangerous climate change. Can we flute makers do our bit to become more sustainable in our energy use? Looks like it…
http://www.mcgee-flutes.com/Solar_powered_flute_making.htm
Terry
Nice Installation Terry!!!
Am thinking of doing something like that eventually. I live in a state that has outlawed coal burning for electricity and gets much of this with hydropower. And one aging nuclear plant that badly needs decommissioning (don’t get me started…).
Meanwhile many of us flute makers do our part for the climate by working at at our homes and not commuting to work. My commute is a 25 meter walk from from my house to my workshop. I make this commute several times daily, about once an hour. Sometime more if I am distracted.
Casey
As well as by sequestering carbon! There’s no good reason why flutes we make today won’t be preserved for hundreds of years - well after the current emergency is over.
We recycle our wood waste by adding it to the green waste at our local tip. So it ends up as mulch on local gardens, finally absorbed into the soil.
You and I produce a small quantity of wood waste actually.
The stuff from the lathe turning ends up spread as much here. The stuff that gets sawn or turned off, or wood that I’ve decided has too many flaws either gets turned into buttons or fittings at a friends, or is used as firewood. I have a 30 gallon barrel just outside my workshop that took 3 years to fill - its full of blackwood, boxwood and mopane pieces. My friend Paul is picking it up this weekend theoretically.
Powering our homes and flute making workshops is a start but its transportation that is the key problem, even if we don’t commute. Nancy and I blew our carbon budget entirely when we flew to Philadelphia earlier this fall. Next year we want to go to Galicia. Having two fuel efficient Honda’s getting 40mpg on average hardly makes a dent.
Here in the Pacific NW we are all cringing at the possibility that we’ll be turned into a large oil and coal exporting region. Congress is trying to free up oil exports in the current budget bill haggling. Tesoro wants to build a big oil terminal in Vancouver WA. It was just revealed that 3 out of the 4 authors of the environmental assessment paper are former BNSF Railroad executives. Not shocking that they severely underplayed the risks of 28 oil trains a week coming through the Columbia Gorge. In the assessment they predicted one Exxon Valdez type accident in the lower Columbia River every 20 years, as if we and the salmon runs should be comfortable with that. The decision for this terminal rests on the hands of Governor Inslee who is off at the Climate Conference. We are already seeing coal trains along I-5 headed to an export terminal in Canada. Its madness.
I also use chips/sawdust as mulch and scraps as kindling for the stove. My wife hit upon making fire starters by soaking sawdust/turning chips in wax and filling up egg cartons with that. We’ll tear off one or two sections each night to start fires when we’re camping. I dunno about putting those into a stove – anyone have suggestions regarding putting something containing a little wax into a wood-burning stove?
You might remember I posted an item about using solar power to build flutes, back in December. At the time, I only had a single channel data bridge, so I couldn’t show generation and consumption on the same chart. New Gateway now installed fixes that.
I realised that gun-drilling flute blanks is almost assuredly the most energy-consuming task in the business. So the new chart shows the result of a battle between gun-drilling and the power of the sun.
Good job!!! 