Hexapod CNC is amazing.

Shipping container house has promise but you need to consider quite a bit – building with containers has very little in common with building with wood and nails. Of course, it is vastly superior to building with wood and nails as well but you have to think outside the box quite a bit to do it right. Insulation is tricky, modifications aren’t hard but you need to approach them the right way and with the right tools. That sort of thing.

A 20′ container really isn’t THAT portable. In order to modify it to be broken down as the author intends… not only will you have to undertake SUBSTANTIAL modifications but doing so with hand tools…. that’s almost a disaster waiting to happen. Containers flex when you cut the walls – which are corrugated. They also happen to be extremely heavy. So even if you were able to convert one to break down (which isn’t impossible), you still have to have robust mechanisms to not only “open” fit back up (and lock it there to prevent it from filling the occupants) but you also need to consider that pulling 8000 lbs of metal for the container alone isn’t exactly energy or gas efficient.

$20,000 for a 150 sq ft house is roughly $133 per sq ft. That is on par with most higher end homes and also includes land. I recognize that the idea is to include the “fully off grid” features in that price – however this doesn’t include land costs and doesn’t include anything about labor involved (which is presumed to be free). There are also economies of scale involved in building a 1500 sq ft home vs a 150 sq ft “shelter” but $20,000 of estimated costs invariably have a tendency to become $30,000 or $40,000 in costs.

I missed the additional details on the shipping container project. Collapsible, why? They are extremely portable as is. Even with the addition of the material required to make one into a home they a still wouldn’t be prohibitively heavy as to preclude to be transported by a 3/4 ton truck using a gooseneck trailer. I don’t know what it is about shipping container that awe so many people so much. In the event one plans to build it in one place planning to move it to another place that has code requirements good luck with that, even if it’s built in a place that has identical code requirement, and was inspected during construction. Commercial mobile homes have HUD stickers that are recognized by most municipalities if not all. You could install inspection panels so an inspector where you move it to can inspect it, but there’s no guarantee that will be acceptable.

I have an old mobile home here that’s being used as storage. At one time I was considering of rebuilding it to have a small inexpensive home to live in that I could move it to where needed, if things really turn South here in the US. Several things nipped that idea in the bud. I have no title for the chassis, if I did it’s so old many cities wouldn’t allow it within the city, even in a MH park, and the inspection thing I mentioned.

uhh, I think “collapsible” means that all the stuff outside the container (solar panels, shade structures, water filtration, etc.) fits into the container for easy transport

shipping container? really? they have things called Motorhomes and Mobile homes for a fricken reason, for 20k he could buy a very nice motorhome or mobile home that won’t have code violations all over the place and won’t have a problem of people not allowing it near them because it looks like the clampets built it.

The container guy is an idiot. there are 27,532.1 sites on this subject. He’s just scamming people to pay for his project.