Wednesday

Today wasn't quite as great as one would hope, but everything can't be roses. It's the rainy season here, and today is the first of a predicted four or five days of rain, which put a dreary tone to the morning. However, we got a few little things done, installing the coin mechanisms in the three cases we've completed, and riveting hinges to the lids. After measuring the wood that was available at the shop, it turned out to be both too thick and too narrow -- and while there's a planer here, there isn't a board stretcher. (that's a joke). The wood was also second-use, and had been exposed to weather for quite some time, leading to warping and saturation. I opted to head to 'Wood Village' with Felix, our driver for the duration of our stay, as well as Aimee, Papa, Michael, and Phillip. We were able to purchase twenty board feet of 1x12 roughcut (pine?) there, for only 50 Cedis -- or about 15USD. Try getting that price in the states. The proprietors of the massive wood yard, which was essentially the back side of an even more massive sawmill, offered to plane the boards to thickness for a few extra Cedis -- great! less work for us -- but alas, the entire district's power had been knocked out by the storm. We'd forgotten about that, as KNUST has auxiliary generators to power the machine shop -- this is a pretty common occurrence here.

Phillip mentioned that there's a planer here at KNUST, but the technician who's trained to operate it was on leave for the summer. Pish posh, I'll do it myself, how hard can a planer be?

Apparently quite hard when it's fifty years old, and while I think I could use the machine if it came down to it, I'll feel much more comfortable with someone familiar with this particular model using it. The shop foreman was able to contact the technician, who offered to come in tomorrow morning and assist for a few Cedis. Hopefully we'll be able to plane and cut the boards then, and assemble all three machines by the weekend.

This afternoon, Aimee and I dismantled a printer which Ron had acquired and hoped to use as a case. I was initially optimistic, as the external layout looks fairly conducive to the geometry of the devices. Upon opening it up, however, it became clear that the internal mechanisms are far too structural, as we'd feared. Desktop computer cases may be more applicable, as they're designed to be self-contained -- we also thought of muffler cans or auxiliary fluid tanks from trucks, which could be about the right size and shape. Time will tell if the Ghanaians can recycle these into cases -- there's a limit to how crude and simple a device can be made while maintaining functionality, and we're quickly approaching it with ideas like this.

A number of new faces joined us at lunch today, including two students of George's (Ron's entrepenauer and mechanical engineering professor friend). Apparently word's spread about this vending machine idea, and these students are very interested in getting on board. I find that I spend the most time explaining the coin mechanism itself: It seems that Ghana really doesn't have such devices, indeed George himself was confused initially that the device would only vend if a coin was inserted. As such, I think this is a definite area of development for next year -- designing and implementing a truly open source coin mechanism would remove the sole proprietary part from the design, and make the entire system truly Ghana-capable from the ground up.