"How can you love your neighbor if you don’t know how to build or mend a fence, how to keep your filth out of his water supply and your poison out of his air; or if you do not produce anything and so have nothing to offer, or do not take care of yourself and so become a burden? How can you be a neighbor without applying principle—without bringing virtue to a practical issue? How will you practice virtue without skill?"
—Wendell Berry, “The Gift of Good Land,” in The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry (2002), p. 299
We dearly hope to be a neighbor... bringing virtue to a practical issue and developing skills to practice that virtue. Be a neighbor.
Water, the building block of life and many times hope.
It makes us clean, it refreshes, strengthens, and fills
us. Hundreds of thousands of us around the world
do not have enough. The availability of water is often
decided by the feasibility of lifting it thirty feet from
where it rests below us. Our engineering challenge is
to design a pump that can be made from materials
available in the third world, is inexpensive enough
for even a very poor farmer to make or purchase,
and is able to pump water up from the bottom of a
thirty foot well. Crazy? Yes. Impossible? Maybe.
Never? Only if we don't try.
We have gotten off to a rough but promising start... we know this is going to be a long ride.
Here Caleb is making a very simple mimic of the
MoneyMaker Hip pump put out by Kickstart
International. The mechanics are simple:
1: Pull the pump handle up
>Oneway valve B cuts off and Oneway valve A
allows water to be sucked into the pump
cylinder.
2: Push the handle down
> Oneway valve A cuts off and Oneway valve B
allows water to be forced out of the pump.
Video description of how it works:
We were surprised at how well the pump worked
once we got a fairly good plunger design down.
After some testing we learned that the pump does
much better at pushing water up hill than pulling it up.
The height change here is only about 15 feet; only
half of our target height.
Here is a video of it working on level ground:
And then not working well when pulling water up hill:
We are not even close to giving up on this dream!
We will keep you posted as plans and designs develop.
Fire: peltier junctions continued
Paul Elliott spent a good three or four hours hand manufacturing and installing the heat sink for the peltier junctions project. (for some background on this project see week 2's "Power of Hotness"post)
The theory is that when the heat from the chimney heats up the base of the sink the top part will heat up as well through conduction. The peltier junctions will be sitting on that top plate and create electricity from the heat differential thereby powering small items such as LED lights to illuminate a dark cooking hut. 
Unfortunately the metal did not conduct as well as we thought so Paul will be forced to go back to the drawing board material wise on this one. Next week will hopefully bring a new and better design.
Paul also tricked out our portable sawdust stove by adding a third can.
This allows the stove to have half again as much heat as the original design. It worked wonderfully and we even used it to make three batches of Chai of over a gallon each and could have probably made more!
One exploratory experiment we conducted (headed up by Kara Tobe) was to boil down Holly leaves in hopes that we can use the wax on the leaves to make a natural sealant.
It didn't work as well as we hoped... but ya gotta keep truckin'!
Truck on with us next week as we go back to the drawing board and even use a little engineering mathematics to tackle our problems!
mmmm... Backwoods Boy-R-D!
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