Home Made Welding Machine

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).


DIY Welder

Home Made Welding Machine in Nairobi, Kenya

Home Made Welding Machine - Parts

Send in your stories of African ingenuity here.

Kenyan Windmill: Bicycle Parts and Roofing Materials

4 brothers in Western Kenya have begun solving water problems by creating waterpump windmills out of old bicycle parts and roofing materials. They have created 30 of them and are making good money doing it. This is another story of Africans solving their own problems using local materials:

The four Ututu brothers had inherited a large area of fertile farmland, which had been terraced by their father in the late 1950s. Despite this resource, they were experiencing problems because they lacked water both for drinking (meaning wasted time, fetching water from 15 km away in the dry season) and for irrigation (thus low yields from the meagre rainfall).

(Read the whole story at Farming Solutions)

Kenyan Waterpump Windmill

(via Timbuktu Chronicles)

African Children’s Toys: Ingenuity Starts at a Young Age

Most African children are forced to create their own toys from scratch. Below are some samplings of what they make with what’s available. Old tire inner-tubes, soda cans, mud, bailing wire and sticks are just a few of the materials used to create imaginative toys.

In just about every country in Africa you’ll find the boys making cars, motorcycles and airplanes out of tin cans and bailing wire:

Ghanaian Toys

The Coke Scooter

In Southern Sudan children use mud to create animals to play with. Below is a picture of a Cape Buffalo:

Mud toy buffalo

Multimachine — truck-parts-based machine shop for Africa

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.

Open Source Multi-Machine

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.

Plans to build a multi-machine can be found at this link at the The Open Source Machine website.

(via BoingBoing)

Bio Latrines in Kenyan Slums

Marlies sends us a bunch of pictures and an interesting story on how bio gas toilets in Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya are being used:

Just the other day on a visit to Kibera Slum I came across this interesting bio gas latrine which is being set up for Kibera people as a response to lacking community toilets. The sanitation situation in Kibera is really really poor! There are a couple of community toilets which where set up after the shooting of the Constant Gardener but only a few years later these are in bad shape! Again, they cost 3/= per visit which is really above of what a typical Kibera inhabitant can afford. Just sum up what it will cost for 5 visits per day for a family of five! So the bio gas latrine is a really good option, since it will generate a little income to make the toilets free of charge.

Here are some pictures:

Kibera bio gas
Kibera Bio Gas Building
Kibera Bio Gas 2

IslamOnline.net has a great writeup on how these work.

[NOTE: If you have any images, stories or reports you’d like others to know about, you can contact us through the AfriGadget contact form. – Thanks Marlies!]

New images! (July 17, 2007). Thanks to Christian Rieck and Marlies:


Bio Latrine - Kibera

Bio Latrine Tower