Image: Lahminewski Lab, CC BY-SA 4.0.

From the Wikipedia page, which summarizes and links to all sources that are available online:

The chukudu is a two-wheeled handmade vehicle used in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is made of wood, and is used for transporting cargo. The chukudu generally has an angular frame, two small wheels (often of wood, sometimes wrapped with rubber), handlebars, and a pad for the operator to place their knee on while propelling the vehicle with their leg. On a descent, the rider stands on the deck like a kick scooter. On flat ground, the rider can put one knee on the deck and push the ground by the other foot like a knee scooter. Rubber mud flaps and shock absorber springs may be added.

In Goma, where chukudus form the “backbone of the local transportation system”, chukudus are made of hard mumba wood and eucalyptus wood, with scrap tires for wheel treads. These chukudus take one to three days to build, and last two to three years. The most commonly used size is about six and one half feet long, and carries a load of 1000 lbs. However, the largest chukudus can carry up to 800 kilograms of weight.

A small chukudu can be built in about three hours, using dimensional lumber and materials available in a hardware store. The chukudu is customizable to carry different types of cargo. To haul firewood some chukudus have a hole drilled in the middle of the sitting deck, and the operator can insert a stick to hold firewood in place. Others have a large basket to carry various loads.

Chukudus image colection.

DIY.

Thanks to Spencer Cappallo.

Shallow ponds and ditches are producers of greenhouse gases, especially methane, which is released by the breakdown or decay of organic material. Gijs Schalkx harvests this methane from ponds — by hand — and uses it to power his moped. Eight hours of hoeing in a ditch supplies him with enough fuel to ride his vehicle for 20 km. He calls it “a quest on keeping the combustion engine alive in a fossil free future”.

* * *

Gijs Schalkx graduated with the project from the ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, the Netherlands. In an interview with Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, Schalkx explains that he likes to work on old motorcycles but “dislikes oil companies like Shell who promise all kinds of things about a better world, but don’t deliver”.

In a book, he came across a story of a fisherman who hung a special tank behind his boat to harvest methane from the water. When the fisherman got home, he was able to fry the fish he caught on the methane gas that he also caught himself. “I found that totally awesome and I set out to develop that idea. Why depend on big corporations and their promises to save the world when you can do it yourself?”.

He calls his contraption the “slootmotor”, which translates into “Ditch motorcycle”.

Refueling from the ditch

Harvesting methane from ditches and ponds is hard work, explains Schalkx: “Methane can rise to the surface spontaneously, but it works better to give it a hand by agitating the bottom of the pond. With an upturned, floating mortar tub, I catch the gas by hoeing underneath. The gas is then led through a hose into the reservoir of the engine, on the back of the motorcycle. I then pressurize the methane with an inverted bicycle pump. A special small petrol tank for the engine is still needed to start the engine.”

It takes the young Dutchman roughly eight hours to collect enough fuel to fill the tank and ride his moped for about 20 km. This is not comparable to the convenience of filling up a gasoline tank or charging an electric battery, but that is exactly the point. “Eight hours of hoeing for a twenty kilometer drive will ensure that it will be the best twenty kilometers of your life.”

The moped achieves a top speed of 43 km/h. According to Schalkx, riding his vehicle also helps the environment. “Capturing methane and using it emits CO2, but that is less bad for the environment than when that methane gas bubbles up and ends up in the environment anyway.”

More images, data and a video (which shows the whole process) can be found at his website. All images courtesy of Gijs Schalkx.

Thanks to Tim Joye.

Despite what you heard, the Amish aren’t against technology. Communities adopt new gadgets such as fax machines and business-use cell phones all the time—so long as the local church approves each one ahead of time, determining that it won’t drastically change their way of life.

So it is with the Amish horse-drawn buggy. You might have thought the technology inside this 1800s method of transportation stopped progressing right around then. Instead, buggy tech keeps advancing, and buggy makers have become electricians and metalworkers to build in all the new tech you can’t see under the traditional black paint.

Read more at Popular Mechanics. Via Amish America.

The German-made Carla Cargo is a three-wheeled cycle trailer with an electric assist motor. It can be pulled by any type of bicycle (including a cargo cycle or an electric bike), and it allows you to carry heavy (up to 150 kg) and bulky cargo (a loading platform of 60 x 160 cm). Uncoupled from the bicycle, the Carla Cargo works as a hand cart for large or heavy loads. The vehicle weighs 40 kg including the battery, and has a range of 40 to 60 km.

The electric motor is built into the front wheel and can produce 250 watts as a trailer (up to 23 km/h), and 500 watts as a handtruck (up to 6 km/h). The lithium-ion battery has a capacity of 11 or 15 Ah. The vehicle has two disk brakes and a parking brake, which are controlled via the handle or the bicycle handlebar.

The Carlo Cargo sells for about 4,000 euro. The construction manual is freely accessible online, but only in German for now. The trailer/handcart is present at the International Cargo Bike Festival, April 16-17, in Nijmegem, the Netherlands.

Previously: 8-wheeler cargo cycle.

Denmark’s Tripl electric motorbike has more cargo space than a Mercedes E-Class estate. The vehicle is aimed at goods delivery in large cities. Heated and refrigerated cargo boxes are available. Some specifications:

• Cargo volume: 750 litres
• Load capacity: 200 kg
• Electric motor: 4 kW
• Top speed: 45 km/h (28 mph)
• Battery: 5.3 kWh / 6.7 kWh / 8 kWh
• Charging time: 5.3 – 8 hours
• Range: 70-100 km (with 8 kWh battery), 50-80 km (6.7 kWh battery), 30-60 km (5.3 kWh battery)
• Weight excl. battery: 221 kg
• Weight with 8 kWh battery: 301 kg
• Length: 241 cm
• Width: 127 cm
• Height: 1170 cm
• Wheelbase: 150 cm
• Turning diameter: 7.5 m

“The design of automobiles has tended toward insulation, offering an ever less involving driving experience. The animating ideal seems to be that the driver should be a disembodied observer, moving through a world of objects that present themselves as though on a screen. We have throttle by wire, brake by wire, and electrical assist (versus hydraulic assist) brakes, as well as traction control and anti-lock brakes that modulate our driving inputs for us. What all this idiot-proofing and abstraction amounts to is a genuine poverty of information reaching the driver.”

“What’s more, the information that does get through is presented in a highly mediated way, conveyed by potentiometers and silky smooth servos rather than by the seat of your pants. It is therefore highly discreet, and does not reflect fuzzy, subtle variations. Nor is it sensitive to changes that haven’t been anticipated and coded for ahead of time, for example the vibration that might arise from a brake caliper bracket that has come loose or cracked. Perhaps most troubling, the electronic mode of presentation means that information about the state of the car and of the road is competing with information from other electronic devices that may be a lot more interesting.”

Read more: The Case for Dangerous Roads and Low-Tech Cars, Matthew B. Crawford. Picture credit.

There has been huge growth in the number and complexity of electronics features on passenger vehicles, says Paul Green, a research professor at the University of Michigan. In tracking just one model, the Infiniti G, over a seven-year period, Green found that the total number of pages in this entry-level luxury car’s multiple owner’s manuals grew by an average of 30 a year.

That means the owner of a 2013 Infiniti G has to read the equivalent of a small novel to understand how to operate all the new features added since 2006.

Just as all cars are not alike, technology-averse car shoppers don’t all slip from the same mold. There are, of course, the traditional Luddites: people who believe technology diminishes humanity and want nothing to do with it. But there also are those who’d rather avoid complex technologies because they can’t, or won’t, take the time to learn how to use them.

Some want to avoid technology that they see as increasing distraction because it requires drivers to look at information screens while operating the vehicle. Some are concerned about the trend toward cars with greater connectivity to the Web because of their potential for being hacked. And there are motoring purists who want nothing to come between them and the hands-on driving experience.

How to buy a low-tech car — car shopping tips for technophobes, a practical guide from automotive website Edmunds. Via WSJ.

The Johanson3 is a stable three-wheeler, with the driver leaning back rather than sitting (though sitting is an option). Feet rest on a plate, and pressing down on that plate creates a lean on the front wheel, turning the vehicle while the rear wheels remain solidly on the ground.

That makes for easy on-and off, especially for those who – owing to age, injury, or fashion choice (“skirts, saris, djellabas, and kimonos” are accommodated, according to Johanson3) – cannot throw a leg over a bicycle seat. Various models accommodate single riders or as many as three adults plus two kids, and can haul up to 660lbs of flesh and cargo. Read more: The J3, a trike that hauls freight, spares frocks.

The Johanson3 is available for pre-order and costs $3,150 – $3,900.

Today’s cars look like spaceships and are built by robots in futuristic factories. At least, that’s the picture in the developed world.

In Ghana, West Africa, both the cars and the auto industry look rather different. In a neighbourhood called Suame Magazine, an estimated 200,000 artisans take apart discarded western cars and use the parts to build easily repairable vehicles that are suitable for African roads. All this happens manually and in open air.

Artist Melle Smets and researcher Joost van Onna, both from the Netherlands, set up shop in Suame Magazine and built a unique African concept car in collaboration with the local community: the SMATI Turtle 1. Their project calls into question western ways of dealing with technology, waste, employment and automation.

Picture: The SMATI Turtle 1

Large cargo ships bring thousands of used cars from Europe to the African markets every week. In Ghana, these vehicles are transported from Tema harbour to Suame Magazine, 10 km north of Kumasi, to get a total makeover. Originating in the 1920s when blacksmiths started to shift their attention from carriages to cars, Suame Magazine now employs an estimated 200,000 artisans in 12,000 enterprises.

It is a self-organizing system capable of building almost anything using car parts; fences, swings, water pumps, carbide compressors, welding machines, but most of all vehicles adapted to the African market. Everything is recycled. Even the unrepairable car parts have a destination: the blast furnace, which melts broken engine blocks into new iron products.

Suame Magazine might look chaotic to Western eyes but all the same it produces cars. Better cars, in a sense. Western automobiles have become so sophisticated that once they break down you cannot repair them yourself.

Stripped to the Bone

In Suame Magazine, first the cars are stripped to the bone. Secondly, all computerized devices are thrown out. A sustainable African car has to be mechanical. When the car is stripped the construction process can begin. The result is a strong and simple car ready to carry heavy loads, with extra cargo space, a mechanical motor, a stronger chassis, stronger rims and iron springs. African roads demand very strong cars. The European cars are too weak.

The SMATI Turtle 1

Melle Smets and Joost van Onna traveled to Kumasi in February 2013 to build an African concept car in collaboration with the local artisanal community. The vehicle, which is called the SMATI Turtle 1, was built according to the motto “Let’s make things simple”, and satisfied the following criteria:

• it was entirely built in Suame Magazine from locally crafted, refurbished and used parts from different brands of discarded cars;
• it is robust and easy to assemble, re-assemble and repair;
• it is a prototype of a car potentially fit for the African market;
• it provides the driver and passengers with a superb experience of the landscape when driven;
• it was built in a time frame of just 12 weeks.

The completed car made a test drive through Ghana, and was inaugurated by the Ashanti king. The SMATI Turtle 1 was then exported to the Netherlands. In this way, discarded car parts which were once exported to Ghana were sent back to where they came from in the shape of a unique automobile. Smets and van Onna have made a website and a video about the SMATI Turtle 1, which was the source material for this post.

The car will be presented at the international IMPAKT festival in Utrecht (the Netherlands) from October 30 to November 3, 2013. This year’s festival theme is “Capitalism Catch 22”. I will be one of the speakers at the IMPAKT festival, so I hope to tell you more about the vehicle in two weeks.

Related articles

• Wood gas cars: firewood in the fuel tank
• Cameroon Blacksmiths
• Jua Kali: Innovation in Kenya’s informal economy
• Is Cuba the first large-scale maker society?
• When low-tech goes IKEA
• How to make everything ourselves: open modular hardware
• More low-tech cars

The architects consider their work to be a toolbox, a starting point for thinking outside the conventional norms and recepies. They argue that decentralized services are more flexible, provide more autonomy, and are more efficient in space, energy and materials.

Antoni and Blasco present, in their own words, an equivalent to Neufert’s “Architect’s data“, the book for architects that records standardized dimensions for centralized systems. “Micromachins” is written in French but the visuals dominate.

“Micromachins”, Damien Antoni and Lydia Blasco, 2011 [download the page to get the high resolution PDF-document]. Thanks to Yann Philippe Tastevin. Update: the architects have added a new link with colour pictures and English translation.

This photo shows at least six operating gas bag buses in Shawan (“Sandy Bay”), Shandong, China, in 1965. I have added the picture to the article on gas bag vehicles. Cars and buses powered by uncompressed gas in large bags were used in many European countries in World War One and Two, and remained in use in some regions of China and other Asian countries until the 1990s. They are more than a historic curiosity, however. In a comment on our earlier article, Paul Nash notes:

“On further reflection, I think the best application for this system, and certainly the one with the least government regulations to hinder the process, would be for powering of farm equipment.

• The gas bag could be installed on a frame on top of the tractor, or on a trailer behind, or a carrier in front or to the side, or some combination of these.
• Aerodynamics are a non issue, and neither is the height of the bag.
• There are no road safety rules to be dealt with.
• The short range is often not an issue, the refueling station is never far away and the diesel engines can still operate on diesel alone if need be.
• The gas bag system also eliminates the $4000 home compressor station needed to fill car CNG tanks from home.

And, of course, the farmer can produce the fuel himself, from waste material – manure, straw, even wood chips, instead of using the harvested grain for ethanol or biodiesel. A wood gasifier could also do this, but needs a warm up and cool down period – the gas bag can be used instantly and for short duration running – a common situation on farms.”

Read more about Gas Bag Vehicles and Wood Gas Cars (another answer to the limited supply of gasoline in World War One and Two).

Picture credit: Ray-Wu.

And why not in the rest of the world? Mumbai Rickshaws. Via Emile Hooge. More low-tech cars.

“This guide will teach you the basic aspects you’ll need to consider to make yourself a road-worthy gravity-powered vehicle. Full suspension on gokart wheels, driver restraints, a ridgid frame with roll bar, and balanced drum brakes are features of the example kart I’ve built that weighs in at under 100lb.”

Of course, this thing only works downhill and is useless as a practical means of transport. But could we please get rid of the Indy 500 and the Formula One circus and race these karts instead? Seems like a lot more fun to me. Previously: DIY replicas of 1930s race cars.

Hase Bikes

Source: “An illustrated directory of the specifications of all domestic and foreign motor-cars and business wagons gasoline, steam, and electric sold in this country“, New York, 1907.

See also: overview of early electric cars.

CycleKarts are small, lightweight, nimble machines made by their drivers for the pursuit of motoring sport. They’re not serious speed-machines or status-generating show cars. They’re purely for the gritty fun and satisfaction of tearing around in a machine you’ve built yourself. Their name originated from the use of bicycle or motorcycle tyres. More.

Related: How to make an adult soapbox kart.

Update: “Wood gas vehicles: firewood in the fuel tank“.

“Chapter XII. On the way of making a second waggon which is propelled by the wind without draught animals, and which dashes violently over open country to the confusion of all troops”

Quoted from “Texaurus regis Francie” by Guido von Vigevano (1331) – see these two texts (translated to English).

The illustration shows a digital replica of Guido Vigevano’s 8 metre long wind-propelled battle wagon, made by historian Ulrich Alertz (he has more drawings). For his replica, Alertz built upon both the texts and the original plans (which are hard to interpret because of the absence of perspective). He concludes that with better gearings and with the insertion of a steering mechanism the wind car would indeed have been able to speed over flat and smooth terrain – in strong winds.

Guido Vigevano’s wind-propelled battle wagon was designed as a weapon in the crusades. But the wind conditions and the scarcity of flat and smooth terrain made it so that the car was never built (although the inventor probably constructed a scale model). It is remarkable that Vigevano imagined a wind car powered by a vertical windmill (hot and sophisticated technology in those days), rather than using a low-tech sail (which the Chinese had done centuries before).

Sources: 1 & 2, both in German. There is a short Wikipedia entry on Guido Vigevano in English. More “machine books” at the database machine drawings. Related: more low-tech cars / floating citadels, powered by wind and water mills.

Picture taken from: c’était au temps où bruxelles brusselait. More low-tech cars.