I'm Chloe, a microengineering student from Switzerland. I've been WWOOFing a few times (short term) in England and Norway.
I came in contact with the Farm Hack community at the end of last year, when I was doing an internship in humanitarian engineering in southern India. My subject was to build a rice planting machine, and I decided to try a pedal-powered version based on a modified bicycle. The Culticycle was a great inspiration to my work but I decided to make something even simpler to build, focusing on having a tool that Indian women can easily use: most farm tools are made by and for men, and the local people I was working with are small women (1m50 or 4.9ft on average).
As my internship wasn't for a very long period (3 months) and our schedule was rules by various external events, we didn't manage to complete our testing of the prototype for the rice transplanter, which needed improving mainly in manufacturing quality. However, the tractor we built out of the bicycle could be used as a driving unit by other people who'd like to develop a simple pedal-powered tool, and I decided to share my designs: TricTrac - Tricycle Tractor
This is the first tool I publish, and I'm aware documentation could be more complete so all comments are welcome!
Hi everyone!
I'm Chloe, a microengineering student from Switzerland. I've been WWOOFing a few times (short term) in England and Norway.
I came in contact with the Farm Hack community at the end of last year, when I was doing an internship in humanitarian engineering in southern India. My subject was to build a rice planting machine, and I decided to try a pedal-powered version based on a modified bicycle. The Culticycle was a great inspiration to my work but I decided to make something even simpler to build, focusing on having a tool that Indian women can easily use: most farm tools are made by and for men, and the local people I was working with are small women (1m50 or 4.9ft on average).
As my internship wasn't for a very long period (3 months) and our schedule was rules by various external events, we didn't manage to complete our testing of the prototype for the rice transplanter, which needed improving mainly in manufacturing quality. However, the tractor we built out of the bicycle could be used as a driving unit by other people who'd like to develop a simple pedal-powered tool, and I decided to share my designs: TricTrac - Tricycle Tractor
This is the first tool I publish, and I'm aware documentation could be more complete so all comments are welcome!
Cheers,
Chloe