About Folk Technica
Step-by-step guides for tech you can make at home.
Why this site exists
Most build guides skip the part where it went wrong. The cost is an estimate, the timeline is optimistic, and the three attempts it really took never make it onto the page. So you start, you hit the thing nobody mentioned, and you assume the problem is you.
We write the other kind. Real costs, real hours, mistakes left in, so you can decide whether to start before you have spent a dollar.
Where the guides come from
A lot of what ends up here comes out of an actual attempt to grow food and build shelter using machines, at the size of one household rather than a farm. It is a question being tested, not a result being sold: can the tools that already exist do enough of this work to matter?
Whatever gets learned along the way gets written down here and given away, including the parts that did not work. Something that only works for the person who built it is not much of a result. The point is that you can build it too, change it, and do it better.
Want to know exactly who "we" is? Read the masthead. It lists every role and who holds it, which right now is one person.
Our Values
Real numbers, including the bad ones
Every guide lists what it actually cost and how long it actually took. If it took three tries, the guide says it took three tries. The parts that went wrong are the most useful thing on the page, so they stay in.
Yours to keep
Guides are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 unless one says otherwise. Copy them, change them, print them, republish them, even commercially. Credit the author and share your version the same way. Nothing here is locked behind an account.
Written for someone starting from zero
Jargon gets explained the first time it shows up, right there in the sentence, so you never have to go look something up to keep reading. You don't need a background in any of this.
Built by people, credited to people
When you publish a guide here it goes out under your name and stays yours. This is a place to put your work, not a place that takes it.
Where the money comes from
Affiliate links
Some links here are affiliate links, which means a small commission comes back to us if you buy through one. It costs you nothing extra, and you are welcome to search the part number yourself instead. Affiliate links and anything sponsored are marked as such.
Gear
Full gear reviews are not up yet. The gear page just lists what we are actually using right now, and it says so plainly.
When reviews do go up, the rule is simple: we say what we paid, we say when something was sent to us for free, and getting something for free does not buy a good write-up.
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