M a k e r

ECO ENGINEER: Baldwin in the studio, taking a break from editing tracks recorded by Grand Canyon Railroad singer Joe Pronto.

reconsidered his vocation during the first Gulf War. “I became disenchanted by weapons people,” he says, “when I saw them celebrating that their system worked because it successfully targeted a hospital door.” Aged 37, he abandoned his house, put together his savings, bought a motor home, and spent the next seven years on the road.

Finally an Arizona real estate agent showed him slightly more than 40 acres for a mere $22,000. “She made me walk up the hill with my eyes closed,” he recalls. “When I opened my eyes I found I had a 60-mile view to the east, and 40 miles to the west.”

The location was right, and he liked the climate, so he parked his RV and started a small business installing solar power equipment for others like himself who wanted to live off the grid. A couple years later he decided to begin building.

Since Baldwin had never tried construction work, he started by reading books to find out how to do it. The one he liked best was Practical Pole Building Construction by Leigh Seddon. “I wanted a method that I could use completely and totally by myself,” he recalls. “I looked into straw-bale, Rastra, many options, but all of them were labor intensive and needed a lot of people. In pole building, an entire

38 Make: Volume 15

There are no neighbors and no law enforcement to tell people to turn their amps down.

house can be supported on just 20 poles, and the rest of the structure goes up one stick at a time.” His initial studio space needed only six poles.

Baldwin rented a Bobcat with an auger attachment to drill the holes, each 1 foot in diameter and 4 feet deep. He poured hand-mixed concrete into each hole and set a 4× 6 pressure-treated Douglas-fir post into the concrete. He attached joists between these poles, laid plywood as a floor, then put in rafters and added a roof.

Now he had protection from the weather as he set about installing the walls. He used bolts to attach all the structural members. The only time he needed help was when he installed ceiling panels: he couldn’t hold them up and screw them into place at the same time.

Since there were no formal building inspections at that time in his corner of the wilderness, he was free to construct the studio as he wished. Still, he says, it would meet or exceed all codes, including factors such as winter snow loads on the roof.

He bought lumber from the usual sources, but saved money on windows and doors by taking advantage of a policy that he found at Lowe’s stores in Phoenix. Anytime a customer returned something that was special-ordered, the store put it out on the floor at a heavily reduced clearance price. “There are 13 Lowe’s stores in Phoenix,” according to Baldwin. “I went to every one of them.”

Construction took longer than he expected, but he only worked on it part time (sometimes as little as one weekend in a month). As he refined the interior, he found himself getting into fine wood finishing. The whole process took three years.

On the roof are seven solar panels yielding about 800 watts. The primary inverter, providing 120 volts AC, is an Exeltech, which generates pure sine-wave output.

“They’re mil-spec,” Baldwin explains, “used in every war room, submarine, and battleship, normally $5,000 but I picked it up for $1,000. It arrived packed in acoustical foam, which of course was very useful to me.” There it was again: symbiotic catalysm at work. The universe was giving him exactly what he needed.