Civic Centre
the heart of the eco-village
Civic Centre
Located centrally between the North and South Hamlets, the Civic Centre is a place that community citizens, guests, visitors, friends of Kirra and others can meet up, share meals or ideas, use the facilities or relax and watch the world go by.
Attached to the Community Kitchen is a huge alfresco deck, to eat your breakfast, lunch or dinner watching the sunset.
There is a 4 metre swimming pool and either side of the pool is the 7 metre reciprocal roof gazebos which can be used for community events such as mediation, massage, education or relaxing when not in use.
There are amenities and community laundry located at the civic centre too.
Facilities
The Civic Centre houses all the services and facilities of the community. Broken into different purpose built areas, the Civic Center is located under a single roof.
Foundry - Metallurgy, casting, metal smelting and refining and heat treatment. The pottery kiln is also located in the Foundry.
Automotive Workshop Bays #1 & #2 - With 2 automotive bays for vehicle servicing and repairs, complete with a vehicle hoist, automotive parts, and machinery like air compressor, automotive tools and specialist automotive equipment.
Metal Machine Shop - With an extensive array of tooling, including metal lathe, grinders, MIG Welder, Stick Welder and Oxy-Acetylene gas torch and welding and brazing, power tools, air tools, and everything you need for large projects or smaller sheet projects. One amazing project is an EDM (Electrical Discharge Machining) tool for ultra precision machining and metal cutting at a molecular level, capable of perfect fitting cuts and pieces.
Fabrication & Painting - Position and construct larger projects in the larger space. This space can also be used for spray painting.
Wood Machine Shop - All the machines that you need to create beautiful hand-crafted timber pieces or multiple items. Lathe, belt and disk sander, drill press, band-saw, thicknesser, laser cutting and engraving and a wide variety of other tools to produce perfect results.
Sawmill - The 5200 mm long sawmill can be used to mill your own timber harvested from the property for your projects. With an abundance of soft-woods like pine, right through to hard-woods like gum, you will be able to mill dimensional lumber for any project. The sawmill has a 26" width capacity and a 1-tonne overhead gantry crane to make moving your timber around easy.
Plastics Laboratory - Making prototypes or fabricating large format 3D printed objects and access to hundreds of metres of a broad range of fabrication plastics, you will be able to easily make just about anything that you can think of. Within this space you will find thermo-setting machines for vacuum forming and a range of other plastic specific tools. The 3D printer is connected to the Computer & Electronics Laboratory so you can CAD your project then print it out. There are plastic recovery and recycling machines here to allow you to process and recycle plastics to make them into something new.
Textiles & Creative - Tie-dying, Sewing, textiles and toys are all on the table, with our industrial high-speed 1000 stitch per minute sewing machine. This space allows you to recover your old lounge, repair your favorite jeans, or patch that old hat. Breath a new lease of life into something old, repair it don't replace it. We have a variety of fabric paints to liven up your wardrobe too.
Computing & Electronics - with this lab the sky is the limit.
ELECTRONICS: The Electronics lab has advanced tools like oscilloscope, Antenna tuning equipment, specialist power supplies, micro-controllers (PLC), programmable micro-computing devices like the Arduino and ESP8266 and ESP32, together with a vast array (into the hundreds of thousands) of supporting components. All the things necessary to make the next big IoT device.
COMPUTING: It doesn't matter if you need to fix a PC or write the next killer app for the iPhone, maintaining you blog or start a new website. With our high-speed internet and WiFi and a number of desktops and laptops available, which is all supported by a professional grade computing environment of HP rack mounted servers and other advanced equipment for developing just about any application you can imagine for Windows, Linux, Mobile or anything in-between. Use the electronics lab to build your device, then the computing lab to program it.
VIDEO PRODUCTION: Sound and Video equipment is also part of this lab. Including 2 High-Def (HD) cameras and editing suite software Camtasia. There is also a simple animation suite to allow you to produce quality videos without using people. To narrate your production, we provide "speechelo" so you can provide a narration in many different langages too. We also have a full chromakey green screen system to allow you to make special content video productions.
Chemistry & Biology Laboratory - The jewel in the fabrication crown. This is a state of the art facility that would make any university lab envious. With photospectrometer, and a broad range of other laboratory equipment including, centrifuge, incubator, highly accurate heating and boiling equipment, 0.0001 g scales, digital microscope, distilling equipment, and a board range of glassware and accessories. This lab is used to further the efforts of the apothecary and biology projects. It is also used for the mycology projects of the community.
Ag Science and Food Science Laboratories - used to demonstrate and test food preperation and preservation techniques, this lab in conjunction with the Chemistry and Biology Lab and the Community Kitchen is used to demonstrate cooking and other food related technologies and techniques.