New me at the forum

[Bogata Suma Croatia]

Hi all technology buffs and tinkerers,
I saw that the moderator is quite active and this site seems pretty lively. I am looking forward to learn a lot. I have been a blacksmith for 15 years making beautiful things for clients home use. We live in our homestead in rural Croatia and are aiming to do impossible things. Like generating our own energy elextricity and other impossible things. Like building a tower restaurant that will look out over a big chunk of Croatia. We are attracting people to come live this rural life and some friends have already made steps to come and join. Anyhow we moved from the city of Leiden Netherlands to Croatia to learn a complete new kind of life. A different culture we definitely suceeded in finding. How one feeds one's self from land, forest and stables, a different language, building our own houses, upkeeping land up to 12 hectares and what not. I was inspired by some engineer in the near east that joined a team to make a jet plane. The guy had no experience with planes, yet they succeeded in making it. It is now a platform that is let's say, adequately compatible and able to control some airspace and more. Now this inspired me in such a way that with the proper investment in 'how to' it should be possible to make certain engines. I have been looking at stirling engines at Tamera community Portugal. And I aim to see if I can get a bit wiser from them. They seem to have a lot of solar heated stirling engines running. And in researching I encountered this website. Well, I trust to have a lot of fun rummaging around here. May all be well whereever you are. Greetings from Peter Scheltus from sunny inland Croatia.

[Bumpkin]

Welcome to the forum. Sorry to miss and not greet your introduction. Sometimes I'm here regular and sometimes not so much. Sounds like we have a lot in common as far as appropriate-tech independence, along with dreams of fostering community. I have genuine respect for true black-smithing. I tend to just point a torch at something and beat on it until it fills my wishes or it breaks; often as not it breaks.

Bumpkin

[Bogata Suma Croatia]

Thank you Bumpkin, The independence wish can point at someone's failure to connect out of some inner shortages usually based on past experiences. Or it can be a senible change of cause. Where energy is produced by agents outside of our - citizens - control and there being a dependency on energy, it needs to be solved. Also if we can succeed in making energy solutions for the regular - rural - home, it might mean we have a market. In the city solar and Stirling should go well together I presume. Anyhow. We are working on attracting people to our own area and close by. When that succeeds, we will share what we learned in the process, so we will have a small influence on rural development as a cause. Creating healthy food, building energy neutral, and mayba some other creative productions for human needs. Beer among other things, happy family life and eating meditteranean sumptuous quisine. Greetings from sunny Croatia. Peter