The UWA hotpress is not exactly in action yet – lacking the electrical work and some minor tweaking – but enough is there to see what changes Derek Goad has made to Darko’s original design. Take a look specifically at the counterweight that allows the press to open like a clamshell and, especially, the way [...]
In conjunction with a winter semester 2010 course being taught by Joshua Pearce at Queens University, MECH 425 – Engineering for Sustainable Development, senior Nate Preston is reviewing, evaluating, and illustrating the Kingston Hotpress design via a public Appropredia wiki. His astute insights can be found here.
Shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires in June 2007, we visited Carlos Perini at the Cooperativa de Trabajo Avellaneda Limitada (http://wasteforlife.org/?p=19). Technically, this is not a cartonero cooperative, but is instead a sort of low level middleman, buying recyclables off of cartoneros in the Dock Sur area, which they sort, process, and sell up the [...]
We worked most of Tuesday with university electricians to rewire the hotpress so that it wouldn’t continually shut down the electrical circuits in the FADU basement, outside of the CEP, where it is now located. By Wednesday morning the electrical work was finished, and a safety control box was fitted to the machine that would [...]
About 2 weeks before arriving in Buenos Aires, we arranged with Carlos Levinton to move the hotpress from INTI, where it had languished this past year, to his Center for Experimental Production (CEP) at the University of Bs.As. We wanted to maximize the short time we had here and work with Carlos’ group to begin [...]
Tomas delivered the Kingston Hotpress to INTI on Thursday as scheduled, and after about 2 hours of fiddling around with the electrical installation, we had a go of it with the strips of plastic bag that Caroline had been cutting up all morning – a task that was as much a necessity as occupational therapy [...]
We recently developed links with Patricia Eisenberg’s group at the Plastics Department of INTI. Initially we hoped to be able to use the hotpress at INTI to try out some of the local materials but today we met Patricia and she was keen to move beyond this and to work in a much more collaborative [...]
Whilst our partner Darko works away in Canada to try to get funding for future work (to build more hot presses in Africa), here in Buenos Aires I try to understand his design and interpret it for the potential hot press manufacturers that I have been speaking to. Its not an easy task – I [...]