The Sunday News
Mncedisi Buhali Sunday News Reporter
DO you have an old bicycle, discarded car gears and a few pieces of scrap metal?
If the answer is “yes”, then Bob’s your uncle, you’ve got a peanut butter maker.Mr Thulani Chauke’s peanut butter-making machine is based on a simple idea that is borderline genius — you cycle, you get peanut butter!
His inspiration: giving rural women a machine that does not use electricity, but keeps them fit through regular exercise.
Mr Chauke (41) constructed the manual peanut butter-making machine that has become the talk of Gwabalanda suburb in Bulawayo using bicycle parts and gears from an old car.
A metalwork teacher by profession, Mr Chauke, who is a holder of a teaching certificate from Hillside Teacher’s College, is driven by passion. He fell in love with metalwork when he was doing Form One at Mzingwane High School in 1987 and knew that one day he would be teaching the subject. He, however, quit the noble profession in 2005 when he was teaching at Pumula High School and is now into welding.
In his spare time, he usually makes electric machines but the plight of rural women working hard to produce peanut butter drove him to create a manual peanut butter-making machine. He was also inspired by erratic power supplies the country is currently facing — a problem he believes can be solved by making maximum use of one’s energy.
When he started working on the machine in January, he wanted to show it off at the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair in April. However, at that time, it still had some flaws. But all’s well that ends well; he has since developed it to perfection.
And according to Mr Chauke, this peanut butter-making machine is only a smaller version of what he is working on — a commercial scale manually operated machine that will change the fortunes of rural women in farming.
“This one is a smaller version of what is coming. The bigger one will be for the rural people; so that they can at least manage to venture into business that will see them value adding their groundnuts in line with the Zim Asset economic blueprint. Instead of them selling groundnuts as they are, they can further process them into peanut butter which they can sell in town,” Mr Chauke explained.
The fascinating story of how Mr Chauke came up with the idea and eventually made a machine that has attracted admiration of quite a number of people, bespeaks a great mind and self-belief in his own abilities.
“I had this old bicycle and old gears of a car that I kept. I knew that one day I would put them to good use,” Mr Chauke said.
“In that machine there is a gear system, in such a way that the gears of a car are for changing motion and increasing speed at the same time. So, for every one cycle or turn that you make, you could have at least 10 turns of the blade. So the faster you turn the pedal, the faster you crush the groundnuts. So there is the issue of speed there. For the bicycle system, the more you cycle the greater the motion and changing of those gears. So it is just a matter of having an old bicycle and old car components.”
Mr Chauke’s machine can also be used for making fruit juice and by people who want to do regular exercises.
“When you are cycling using your energy, you sweat and hence burn fats in your body. Instead of people going to the gym or buying some expensive meals to lose weight, they can convert that energy into production. You can also use the machine to make fruit juices and fruit cocktails, besides crushing groundnuts,” he said.
“In seven minutes, you can fill two 375ml bottles of peanut butter. How much you make basically depends on your endurance. If you have children, sometimes you can call them to come and cycle, they will be playing but at the same time production is moving. Instead of children running around all day, you can just give them the bicycle; they will be enjoying the ride but at the same time the energy that they could have spent outside produces peanut butter which will give them even more energy. It’s a give and take situation.”
However, Mr Chauke said he wanted to patent his product before releasing it.
“Since you had some interest in my machine, this means anybody else would love to see what I have done. So I need to at least protect it first, because there are so many big guys who know that we are financially challenged. They can come and steal my idea then they flood the market. I won’t even be able to have a say in the matter. So by December, I think I will be done with everything then the machine will probably be ready for sale,” he said.
Other products that Mr Chauke has made include freezit-making and fence-making machines which are both electric powered.
