Peter Kahugu of Banana Hill just outside Nairobi makes a living using his bicycle.
And no, he is not a professional cyclist.
AfriGadget reporter Afromusing and I had an opportunity to interview Peter who has modified his bicycle with a belt, a set of tensioning pulleys and a grinding stone to make it a knife-sharpening machine. By kicking the bike up onto its stand and engaging a gearing system, he is able to use “leg-horsepower” to drive a grinding wheel and sharpen knives while “on the move”.
Peter has been at this for 2 years now and he makes about Kshs 500 ( app. 10 US$) a day by riding his mobile workshop from client to client sharpening all their knives as he goes. The grinding stone he uses has lasted an astounding 2 years and he has had to replace his drive belt a couple of times but that is as simple as cutting up a long strip of rubber from an old car or bicycle tire inner tube.
Be sure to click though on the image for video on YouTube of the Peter and his bike in action.
Being on the ground in Nairobi makes it a little easier to find good AfriGadget stories. I took a walk down Ngong road, an area with a lot of shadetree mechanics, wood carvers and metal fabricators. The first place I stopped at had a home made welding machine.
Simon, the shop owner, showed me a couple of the machines and gave a video tour of how it works. He’s a prime example how an entrepreneur in Africa will figure out ingenious solutions to meet local market demands. The welders sell for around 14,000 Kenya Shillings (just over $200), but fabrication costs only a small fraction of that.
Below is the video and some pictures. (Another video will be uploaded later, connection speed issues preclude me uploading another one right now).
The MultiMachine Group at Yahoo! Groups carries plans for “The Multi-Machine” which is
an accurate all-purpose machine tool that can be built by a semi-skilled mechanic with just common hand tools.
Multi-machines are 3 in 1 machines based on old car engine blocks (a 3-in-1 machine is usually a combination of a metal lathe, mill and drill press). The machines are designed such that they use the tolerances and engineering initially used to create the engine block that is re-purposed as the core of the tool to help guarantee that various components of the machine integrate with a high level of precision.
The machines have a design that not only allows them to be assembled using “elbow grease” but that also allow them to run on alternative power sources where mains electricity is not available. They are also easily adaptable to new purposes by adding on modules.
I was travelling in an upcountry minibus today when the guy seated just next to me pulled out his new mobile phone he recently purchased in Embu, Kenya.
Safaricom, the biggest mobile phone network provider in Kenya with about 5 million customers, introduced some handsets in the past, which enable resellers to deliver phone services to the public. Such handsets, which look like phones for fixed-lines, often come with an external display that shows the units consumed by customers.
The two (gsm) mobile phone networks in Kenya have become very succesful, as the state owned telecommunications company only provided the country with about 300.000 fixed-lines of which many are out of order or have been subject to vandalism.
Next to providing the public with mobile phone booths, these public phones also offer a great small-scale business opportunity for the owners of such handsets. And for those who obtain their pre-paid scratchcards at a wholesale price, there’s a 5% revenue coming along. These public phone booths are just a perfect way of helping people start their own business where the initial starting costs are quite low.
(please excuse the poor picture quality)
So, instead of buying a rather expensive Safaricom handset which is specially designed for use with these roadside telephone booths, this guy next to me bought the Afrigadget-solution: This gadget actually is a very cheap MadeInChina fixed-line phone which has been ripped of it’s inwards. The person who modified it ripped an old Siemens C25 phone apart and installed its display instead of the one that came along with this phone. The keypad is soldered to the phone and a rechargeable battery is inside the box with an external power supply.
The SIM card holder at the back of the phone comes with a dual-SIM-card adapter so that the operator may add another network and switch between both networks by simply switching it on and off.
These DIY-handsets for public phone booths come at a price range of about Ksh. 2.000 - 5.000 /= (~ US-$ 28 - 70) and are about half of the price the “official” handsets are selling for.
Mr Darko is a “straighter” - so-called because he can straighten crooked vehicles.
He is one of an estimated 80,000 mechanics, engineers and artisans who work in Suame Magazine, an industrial slum, possibly one of Africa’s biggest.
Frank Darko specialises in straightening wrecked vehicles. On the outskirts of the Ghana’s second city, Kumasi, the Magazine’s origins lie in the city’s long history of working gold and other metals.
Over time, more and more of these artisans turned their hands to vehicle repairs and engineering, eventually moving to Kumasi’s Suame suburb after World War II.
In a continent and a country where buying new can stretch already overburdened pockets, the Magazine’s artisans show how far you can get with ingenuity, skill and a few mechanical tools.
GeekCorps has a story about a Mali radio station that is using wifi to stream video content to TVs run on car batteries in the village of Bourem Inaly in Mali. What is particularly cool about this project is that the wi-fi antennae are all made locally by recycling local materials including cans. The only imported part is the audio/video receiver that is imported from Canada. The radio station currently has 15 subscriptions to the service that make it $45 a month.
The larger part of Africa’s population do not have access to “processed” fuels like natural gas or modern cooking equipment. This means they are primarily dependent on open wood fires, a method of cooking that it extremely inefficient and harzardous to the environment.
The Kenya Ceramic Jiko (”jiko” is the Swahili word for cooker) solves two problems simulataneouly by addressing the issue of high cost of raw material for making the cooking equipment as well as reducing the amount of biomass required to cook by using available energy more efficiently.
This ingenious application of appropriate technology is composed of a fired ceramic heat containing liner fitted inside a metal housing. This housing is typically made from metal sheeting from discarded packaging - such as the ubiquitous 55 gallon steel drum - that would otherwise have ended up as hazardous waste in the environment. The liner essentially acts as an insulator when burning wood or charcoal containing the heat generated to ensure that it goes to cooking rather than escaping into the environment. This means that the ceramic cooker typically uses between 25 to 40% less fuel than a regular jiko.
You can find more information about this ingenious invention at the following links:
Tools for specific needs can be expensive or hard to come by in some places in Africa. It could be something as simple as a certain sized wrench that is needed to remove a particular bolt.
I decided to take a short walk in Nairobi and just see what caught my eye. Bernard runs a small engine repair shop on the outskirts of Nairobi, Kenya. Mostly, he fixes lawn mower engines for the wealthy people living nearby, however he also fixes about any other small engine that you can think of.
The tools shown below are just what he works with. Many times he has to fabricate pieces that would be impossible to buy, or to expensive for him to make a profit on. It is really amazing to see him work, and to watch the problem-solving take place. As Bernard shows us in this video and pictures, your imagination and ingenuity are the only things holding you back.
Below, a piece of rebar is bent, and the end hollowed-out to make a specific sized wrench:
Below, a bolt from a truck tire is welded to a piece of metal to make a specific sized Allen wrench for small engines:
Bernard took me to see Stephan, an auto mechanic who is a master of fixing things with very few tools or supplies. Stephan is truly amazing, an example of an African who uses his ingenuity to solve problems that would seem insurmountable to others.
One of the things Stephan has done, is figured out a way to rebuild alternators with limited materials. Below are some pictures and a video that discuss how he does it. Supplies needed:
