Our project:
The last group of students that went down helped design a bed that could easily be build there. Beds are important because there are bugs that live in the dirt that can cause diseases in the people. Most people in this village are too poor for a real bed, and even if they had a real mattress, it would probably become infested with bugs and/ or get moldy etc. Instead of using rope to make a weave to sleep on, they found a way to connect plastic garbage bags together because it was cheaper. The problem came because the plastic bags would stretch out in time. They decided to try and make rope with twine they had. They were able to accomplish this, but it took approximately 8 people, 8 hours to hand braid the rope to go on the bed. That's 64 man hours! Our task was to design a rope-maker that could be built in a third-world country from supplies they would have easily available to them.
We went through a lot of brainstorming sessions and trials and errors and eventually we came up with the design for our bicycle rope maker. I won't go into the details of all the problems we encountered building it...but there were a lot. And we overcame every obstacle so it worked beautifully in the end. We were able to spin all the rope needed for the bed in about 10 man hours. Even more motivating to us was the fact that we decided to enter it into the school's Research and Creative Works Conference. Sadly they placed us in the Junior Engineering category so we were up against the engineering students but we still managed to place 3rd out of the 5 or 6 teams in our division. That's quite an accomplishment for some health science kids!
This is my wonderful group. It's a good thing we all liked each other or it could have been a really long semester. The poster is made of rope of differing materials. We used yarn (red), toilet paper (white), thread (green), crepe paper (yellow), twine (brown) and baling twine (black, and what we used for the bed). You can make rope out of anything!
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This is all the rope we made for the bed. We got faster as we went and if we had made it as efficiently at the beginning as we did at the end it probably would have taken less than 6 man hours to make it all.
The main side of the rope maker is designed to spin the twine separately, first. We used anywhere from two to ten lengths of twine/yarn/ thread in the first phase to create a strong base. They were twisted by simply turning the pedals of the bike. If you sat on a chair you could actually pedal it like a bicycle but we preferred just turning the pedals by hand.
The second part of the rope maker was made by using another bike. We attached the two parts of the rope on the other side and spun that side to twist the two individual pieces together to make a rope! We could adjust the space between the two bikes to be about as long as we wanted if we wanted to make a longer rope.
