
BRINGING YOUR IDEAS TO LIFE
Terra Peg








Terra Peg is an amazingly strong and durable product made from 100% recycled wood fiber. This sustainable Green product can build shelter for a family in one day without the use of electricity. It is perfect for disaster relief situations, or even for housing those unexpected relatives in a variety of needful situations.
WHAT
The Medium Density Fiberboard (MDF) we use is typically a 4x8 sheet of thick (1/4 to 1 inch or more) unbleached brown paper. It is a commodity material with more than 100 mills now producing over 100 million cubic meters per year worldwide. It is made with 100% recycled wood fiber and is quite different from particleboard (we call it organized sawdust) the stuff of cheap crumbly furniture throughout our lifetimes. MDF, like all materials, has its strengths and weaknesses. It does not glue, screw or nail well, especially on the edge, and therefore is seldom used for structural applications. On the other hand, MDF has several important strengths: it’s amazingly strong in two dimensions, it has a smooth surface and edges, it is very inexpensive, and is arguably among the most Sustainable, Green building materials on the planet!
We developed a simple fastening method (the Tool-Free Joint) making structural applications using MDF possible. It takes advantage of MDF’s strengths to defeat its edge weakness. This Joint is amazingly strong, needs no metal parts and is easily assembled (or dis-assembled) using just an MDF hammer. All parts of the furniture or structure are cut with CNC technology, quickly, precisely and inexpensively.
These three elements are the key: the MDF material, the CNC cutting and the Tool-Free Joint, together create an exceptional investment opportunity in the business world, an essentially new, and relatively unlimited, family of products… a New Product Line. We can add new products as quickly as we can market them.
Both our Terra Peg Furniture and our Shelter In A Day buildings are new designs using ground breaking technology and recycled and recyclable fiberboard materials. All of our designs are simple and inexpensive to manufacture (yes even in the USA), ship flat-packed, assemble easily by the end-user, will sell at a competitive price to be able to compete with comparable imports and competitors. We have well over 50 proven furniture designs including a full suite of college dorm furniture which can compete at half the price and 15% of the shipping cost of currently popular competing products. We have ready designs for products suitable for several different markets and new ones are always within reach.
These designs have won several awards including Peoples’ Choice at an Inventors Fair (Fort Lauderdale) and ‘Most Innovative Product’, in a landslide vote by attendees at the Aid and International Development Forum in Washington D.C. We have secured a Patent for Shelter, Copyrights for several designs, Trademarks for Terrapeg and Shelter In A Day and we own the dot Com web addresses for both.
At this point, testing samples have been used commercially for 10 years to gauge product life and consumer approval with remarkable results.
Why
We are not just talking about selling some cute new chairs. Terrapeg represents a fundamental (and market disruptive) technological shift in the way furnishings, housing and consumer goods are sustainably produced. All of our pieces are quickly and accurately cut using the latest in low cost CNC Routers. The furniture pieces are designed to require minimal hand work and require no sanding. The inexpensive fiberboard materials we cut for Terrapeg furniture can be quickly and inexpensively powder coated in many colors, including school colors, and textures. Designs can be machine carved to personalize, adding names, designs, or logos.
Markets
There are many possible markets for Terra Peg products including students, starting families, commercial, office and restaurants, aid organizations like the Red Cross, Federal Disaster Relief, NGO’s, missionaries, religious and USAID, the State Department, FEMA and DOD military. Considering it’s one of the basics, (water, food, and shelter) it is senseless to talk about the extent of these markets. They are of staggering size. The UNHCR estimates there are over 100 million newly homeless people per year for various reasons, and we are also adding 684,000 new people to the Earth every day! These products can be both sustainable enough and affordable enough to succeed in these developing markets.
Summary
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Our products use MDF, a low cost, existing material in need of new markets.
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Our products are the very definition of GREEN, made with arguably the Earths most basic, sustainable material, recycled wood fiber.
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CNC cutting is fast and precise, minimizes waste and controls labor costs.
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Inexpensive materials coupled with inexpensive labor costs allow competitive retail pricing for volume sales and franchised, distributed manufacturing.
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Knock-Together technology allows Flat-Pack shipping.
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Fun and easy end-user assembly saves time, labor and shipping costs.
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Designs are intriguing, unique and generate customer attention.
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New ideas for consumer products using the same technology present an almost inexhaustible supply of exciting new products into the future.
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Combine Terra Peg furniture with Shelter In A Day buildings and it is now possible to build a furnished House, School or Clinic, in one day, and without tools or power equipment of any kind and all of it ships flat-packed.
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We have maintained a clean wake and have no existing financial or legal entanglements.
WHO
Frank Schooley is a Product Designer and lifelong furniture and cabinetmaker with manufacturing skills, and is using software to design, and Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) machines to manufacture custom kitchen cabinets for the local remodel market. Over the last 10 years he developed Terrapeg Furniture and a versatile, new building, Shelter In A Day.
