We have had quite the time developing an effective wooden mold. Our first mold attempt ended in complete disaster and was completely destroyed, while our second mold produced a working filter but only had to be partly destroyed. Our 3rd mold has now produced two filters and is working great. It seems we have finally found a working design for wooden mold for a the biosand filter. Thank God!!!
Today we are having a training for the households that are interested in receiving one of the filters. We hope to produce 4 or 5 filters in all. Today is designed as a test to see which families are truly interested in learning about the filter and later receiving one. We tried to have a similar meeting yesterday but nobody showed up. Of course everyone told us they were coming but that is besides the point around here. After nobody showed up we went down to the store where the garden women usually are and found many of them there. They said they were working at the garden and that's why they didn't come to the meeting yesterday, but then enthusiastically said they wanted to come today at 3pm for the training. Who knows what will happen today? Yesterday I got my translator to show up because I let him borrow some movies from me. I don't have any leverage to encourage him to come today, maybe he'll just be nice and come without getting anything in return?
We are officially leaving our site on November 20th and will only be returning maybe one time next year. Rachel's school is talking about a going away party for her but there has been no such talk of one at my school. We are looking forward to going home so much!!! We can't wait to be back in America where things make sense and be around our family and friends. We should be back in America on Dec 2nd or 3rd; we don't know yet because we haven't received our final tickets. Its been a wonderful experience living here and we're going to miss so many things about our little rural town. We have learned a ton about working with people in doing community projects and the rigors of living in another culture for an extended period of time. We pray that God will bless the people we have worked with and that what is from Him will stick and what isn't will fade away.
Thank you to all who read this blog, think about, and pray for us. We couldn't have made it through without all of your support, and that is definitely the truth. We are looking forward to our time at home now and our next year drilling water wells all over Namibia.
God bless you all,
Caleb and Rachel
Posts
5 comments:
Only 2 more weeks!!!
That's a really cool filter. I'm impressed! Way to persevere!
Very good work on the filter! I am extremely interested in how you got a working wooden mold, as I am looking at a project to build some biosand filters in Nepal later this year. It would be very difficult for us to make steel molds. What's the secret? :)
Dougal,
Its hard to explain over a short message like this especially without pictures. What is your email or US phone number and I can tell you in more detail. In short you have two parts of the mold, the inner mold and outer mold. The outer mold is a simple rectangular prism made from plywood where each side overlaps and is screwed into the side of the next.
The inner mold is much more complicated. After a few tries and failures we landed on a screwless/nailess design where instead of the sides overlapping like the outer mold, you have two smaller sides sandwiched by two bigger sides. They are held together using tension. In 3-4 places on the bigger sides you attached wall hooks into the wood. You then pull the two sides together using the tension from a small rope tightened by twisting a pencil in it until its tight. Additionally we fashioned wooden supports that spanned the length of the bigger sides. This kept the cement from pushing in the two smaller sides.
Other important things for the inner mold was the bottom of the inner mold. This was a rectangular piece of wood that was cut to fit inside the inner mold and not screw on top of the 4 sides. This is important because the cement will wrap around it and you can't get it out if you fit it on top:) So this bottom piece is totally loose and we screwed a handle to it so we could pull it out after the cementer cured. Additionally we had to fashion long 2x4's that spanned the length of the inner mold from top to bottom. This kept the bottom of the filter from being pushed in by the cement.
After we had setup the inner mold we covered it in a sheath of plastic and rubbed margarine all over it so it wouldn't stick to the wood.
Before you attach inner mold to the outer you must put in the pvc piping or flexible plastic tubing.
The inner mold and outer mold are attached to each other by a top that covers both the inner and outer mold. This top is flush with the outer edge of the outer mold while the inner mold is screwed into the top. This is very hard to explain without a diagram.
The list goes on of small tweaks we made to make sure it worked out well. by the end we really had a working wooden filter that could reproduced numerous filters. If you are really serious about this I can send you pictures and detailed instructions on how we built it and we could continue our dialogue.
By the way I think the secret is being a genius, just kidding:)
Caleb
Sorry about the delay - my email address is dj.cowan at auckland.ac.nz
A group of us plan to start teaching ourselves to build these things as soon as possible, so any pictures or details of what you achieved would be really helpful.
Post a Comment