Author: JKE

Lamutiki

Anyone remembers David Mayer de Rothschild’s Plastiki, “a 60 feet (18 m) catamaran made out of 12,500 reclaimed plastic bottles and other recycled PET plastic and waste products” that successfully conquered the Pacific Ocean last year?

Well, it seems this young man from Lamu (Kenya) had a similar idea and is in the process of building his own plastic bottle boat. Our reader Arthur Buliva from Kenya just sent us these pictures with the following explanation:

I was in Lamu recently and came across this man who was making a boat out of plastic bottles and old slippers. He was not yet finished with it yet but I took the few photos of the product that I could.

He says that he collects plastic water bottles that the tourists throw on the beach. He also wakes up early in the morning to collect bottles washed ashore from the sea. With these he has constructed the (in his own words, “first in its kind”) boat.

He water-proofs it by sealing the gaps with used slippers collected in the very same way. Then boils tar in order to glue the components all together.

Kenya believe it? 🙂

(all images kindly shared by Arthur Buliva under a CC-SA licence – thx!)

Les forgerons du Cameroun

Our dear friend Bill, who already provided us with this great story on Cameroonian Bamboo Magic, recently also posted another story on the metal workers – les forgerons – in Cameroon on his private blog:


Tweezers (source)

On the outskirts of Maroua, the capital of the Extreme North of Cameroon, is a place quite unlike any other in the country. Here a community of les forgerons—blacksmiths, or metalworkers—practice their craft in the relative cool of a tree grove. Several dozen men with specialized skills are gathered here for a single purpose: to transform piles of scrap iron into finely finished tools, stoves, replacement parts and other useful implements for sale to the local population. Young apprentices learn the craft while operating bellows or shaping wood for tool handles. The production here is performed entirely by hand and on a scale which must be seen to be fully appreciated. ….

Head on over to his blog for the full post: The Extraordinary Makers of Maroua

The Kahawa West Aircraft

We are not really sure if this homemade aircraft will ever manage to take off (or land), but – according to the following reports aired on Kenyan TV a few days ago – I.T. specialist Gabriel Nderitu from Kahawa West in Kenya obviously spent much love & funds on building his very own aircraft.


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Our avid readers will certainly remember Mubarak Abdullahi’s home-made helicopter in Nigeria, the homemade helicopter in Somaliland as well as this odd story on someone who claims to having built a single seater aircraft way back in the 1970s from an old VW Beetle engine (hey, at least air-cooled, the way it’s supposed to be). The important and innovative part, it seems, is that these guys were willing and able to invest time and money into their projects – even though success is uncertain.


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Yes, why not?!

Update:

The Kenyan TV station did a follow-up on the story and… well, it seems that Mr. Nderitu miscalculated the stability of his landing gear (among other things).


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(Kupoteya njia ndiyo kujua njia.)

And here’s another update via the BBC who paid this man a visit in March 2011.

Building a (one-stage) Anaerobic Digester

David of the Kenyan Community Initiative Support (KCIS) recently built a very low tech Anaerobic digester using only a drum, a valve and some pipes:

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The balloon shows that gas is being produced. The costs for the drum and professional valves may already be too high for some, and the design isn’t that optimal. They intend to add a storage drum with a water-filled header tank for constant pressure and the loading & desludging processes obviously still require some work.

We still like the approach though, because it does indeed “prove the theory”, as David notes. The theory of building a rather small anaerobic digester that will even work with smaller amounts of organic waste.

Goes to show that producing methane gas from something which would otherwise remain unused (livestock faeces usually kept in such drums for a few weeks without harvesting the methane potential) still is an interesting alternative & well appreciated once costs are covered.