Hasta La Ideas

As we mentioned in the post on Holland’s Sand Motor, the Dutch have been harnessing wind for useful purposes for nearly a thousand years. So Dave Hakkens, a modern-day designer based in Eindhoven, didn’t have to look far to find motive power for his oil-pressing machine. “We have quite some wind here, just for free!” he writes.

I like good food! Food which is made in the right way with good ingredients. Usually this is home made food. But his often takes a lot of time and energy… So we start making food industrial to reduce this… which is smart but it also makes poor quality food. I wanted to make a machine which would get the best of both production methods and produce good products on a easy way.

I made an oil pressing machine which works only on wind energy. The machine is made to press nuts and seeds such as walnuts, peanuts, sesame seeds, linseeds, hazelnuts. The wind power is transformed with a worm drive to make the movement slow but very powerful.

First I gather some nuts and put them in the machine. When the machine starts pressing I just sit back and relax. The leftover pulp is full of protein, great for cooking or feed your animals and plants with.. The machine doesn’t use heat which means good pure cold pressed oil is produced.

Further keeping his footprint small, Hakkens reuses old soy sauce and salad dressing bottles hold his new creations. “The only thing I need to pay for [is] the cork and the label,” he explains. “The rest is just for free.”

(more…)