from Boing-Boing, a suggested way to keep discarded pollutants out of our scarce drinking water.
** Be sure to read the comment from the designer ** Click on his name to go to the site itself. (Thank you.) There he suggests students could build one for school shop class then use it to build other stuff (or to repair other stuff, like boats, snowmachines, water plant, …)
Multimachine — truck-parts-based machine shop for Africa
Cory Doctorow: Mike sez, “The multimachine is a milling machine, drill press, and lathe all in one machine that is made from old truck engines and other scrap parts. The very making of it imparts the skills needed to use it. It’s of the ‘teach a man to fish’ school rather than the ‘here, have a fish’ school. Some hand tools are required to build it… “Right now if a NGO gives a well pump to a village in Africa, what does the village do when it breaks? With a multimachine, or tools like it, they can fix it themselves.” Link to PDF of manual, Link to Yahoo Group
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The boingboing picture is a little misleading because it shows storebought stuff on the MultiMachine that I used when I was developing it. The “How to Build” book on my Yahoo group site has great plans for building a version of the MultiMachine using only broken engine blocks, discarded driveshaft parts, steel bar stock, and concrete mix. Tooling can be made from broken drill bits. The bearings/bushings, etc., are simple castings made from pouring a mix of zinc and aluminum into holes in sand, a Bronze Age technique. Machining is done on a “temporary” lathe the builder makes, and holes can be drilled with a version of a blacksmith’s drill in use as far back as the 1850s that I “updated” so that it can be made from two tree stumps. Electricity is needed neither to build nor to operate the MultiMachine.
My message is simple: If you’re good at working with tools, opportunity may be close at hand – no matter how poor you are or what area of the world you live in.
Pat Delany