Richard goes crunchy:

There is a shop in Charing Cross station, which I used to refuse to go in (except once whilst drunk) which sells all kinds of organic/fair-trade/horrendously worthy, dried fruit. I refused to go in partly because of the apparent possibility of catching hippy and partly because when the shop first opened one of the promoters offered me some form of luminous coloured shrivelled sample saying it was “mother nature’s candy” (Shudder).

Well it appears I may have caught hippy (maybe one drunken exposure is enough) because the current hobby project is the construction of a solar drier for fruit.

Nigeria is blessed with an inordinate number of Mango trees, each producing about 1000 fruits. We are now approaching mango season where there are more mangoes around than it is possible for the Nigerian populous to eat. A UN report (I know, I have far too much spare time) recons around 50% of the mango crop is wasted . A suspiciously unscientific and round percentage if you ask me, but we’ll use until I can be bothered to further investigate mango production in Nigeria which will probably be never. If only there was some way to store them, so mango could be enjoyed all year round..... enter project dryer.

The basic design of an indirect dryer can be seen above. Air enters at the bottom of a thermal collector (1), heats up and rises through the main drying chamber (2), passing the stuff whot you want to dry (3) and taking with it some water. The ideal drying temperature is around 50°C any higher and you end up with cooked product any lower and bacteria etc can still multiply. Nigeiria’s air temperature at the moment is around 38-40°C so a temperature rise of 10 degrees should be fairly easy (but the design might have to be adaptable through the year).

I am also trying to build a really low cost direct solar dryer with Hope For The Village Child (HVC) but these have the drawback that the direct sunlight breaks down all the vitamins and discolours the end product. The type sold in the shop in Charing Cross will be indirect dried, with some form of preservative treatment before drying to preserve the lovely bright colours.

So what i needed was a small metal box for the drier with a big thin, flat, metal box to act as the collector. As everyone knows there is only one place to go in Kaduna for such a construction... Pantaka (insert sudden intake of breath, or something like “not Pantaka that’s suicide” etc).

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Pantaka is Kaduna’s post apocalyptic industrial area where all kinds of woodwork and metalwork are carried out. The place is cross between the middle ages and a Mad Max film, pots of molten aluminium bubble away on the side of the dirt tracks which crisscross each other away from the tarmac road where HGV’s, vans and okadas bring in raw materials and take out “finished” goods. The atmosphere is rancid, the background music is the constant hum of generators but if you want get some scrap wood, need some spot wielding or fancy seeing some of the worst examples of child labour and poor health and safety in the world (I hope), this is the place.

Aluminium smelters casting a cooking pot, note the careful use of safety flip flops.

The whole place is organised in sections with an area for each trade and then subareas for each specialism, it took us a while to locate the metal section, then find the sheet steel section. We found a nice man called Bash (yep that is his real name, “hello i’m Bash the metal worker”) and suppressing inner giggles I judged somewhat inexpertly that he seemed to have the requisite skills to construct a glorified metal box.

Clutching my carefully prepared bit of paper with diagrams on, we began the difficult task of explaining i wanted one metal box than wouldn’t fit in the other and wasn’t a piece of furniture. After a lot of explaining and re-explaining to the surrounding crowd of workers in Hausa, a chorus of generally satisfied “Na garne” (i understand) was muttered by all. In this process I carefully demonstrated on the diagram all the dimensions, and even tried to build a model out of scap bits of metal lying around the place. I though that they had grasped the idea.

Two days later I returned and was presented by drier box twice the size shown on the diagram, with a tray in the bottom. Some re-explaining happened, more money changed hands, as the single sheet of steel we purchased would no longer be enough, and there was much more Na garne.

Eventually on the third visit and under supervision for the last couple of bits/hours (“what is he doing”, “cutting the second hole”, “errr, i don’t want another hole”, “ah”) we finished the dryer.

The guy who made almost the entire dryer using only a hammer, a sharp bit of metal (for cutting), a steel girder (as an anvil) and a hell of a lot of ingenuity.

This is the project come to fruition*, set up at Moniques Deaf School (they now have a large collection of my solar based nonsense projects).

Luckily it can also be used for meat the most capitalist and manly of snacks so I can cancel the tie dye T-shirt order and have a shave.

Making the wire racks to go inside. These are normal steel so we’re putting a layer of thin fabric (new handkerchiefs) down first so they don’t rust onto the fruit.

Today we started drying pineapple, which is about the one dried fruit product which i’ve actually tasted, further updates will be posted once this is actually dry(or not if it doesn’t work) .

* I had to use this pun once

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The obvious question is why, and how much did all this cost. The total cost of the metal sheets and labour was N9,000 (£36), racks were N750 (£3) and if i have to paint it this will be around another N500 (£2). This is about twice what i think will be an “economic” price, assuming the ability to dry around 3kg of fruit in two days. This version only has 3 racks over the one meter and has to be loaded from the top, I think in any new version it needs to have 6 racks across half the size and have a hinged back to allow easy loading.

All I need now are some customers. The plan is to start drying the product and using it to illustrate what is possible, as yet no Nigerian i have met belives that the crazy box will work, not even my amazing side kick the deaf school driver Malam lawal, hopefully this will change soon!

As ever i apologies for the length of the post, and the delay in posting since last time. I hope everyone is good back at home, and i enjoy reading your comments and I might actually respond to some if I knew the answers.