Hotpress Innovation

The UWA hotpress is not exactly in action yet – lacking the electrical work and some minor tweaking – but enough is there to see what changes Derek Goad has made to Darko’s original design. Take a look specifically at the counterweight that allows...

Building Upon What’s Been Built

In conjunction with a winter semester 2010 course being taught by Joshua Pearce at Queens University, MECH 425 – Engineering for Sustainable Development, senior Nate Preston is reviewing, evaluating, and illustrating the Kingston Hotpress design via a public...

Closing the Circle

Shortly after arriving in Buenos Aires in June 2007, we visited Carlos Perini at the Cooperativa de Trabajo Avellaneda Limitada (https://www.wasteforlife.org/?p=19). Technically, this is not a cartonero cooperative, but is instead a sort of low level middleman, buying...

It Works

We worked most of Tuesday with university electricians to rewire the hotpress so that it wouldn’t continually shut down the electrical circuits in the FADU basement, outside of the CEP, where it is now located. By Wednesday morning the electrical work was...

Very Hot (pressing)

About 2 weeks before arriving in Buenos Aires, we arranged with Carlos Levinton to move the hotpress from INTI, where it had languished this past year, to his Center for Experimental Production (CEP) at the University of Bs.As. We wanted to maximize the short time we...

Champagne!

Tomas delivered the Kingston Hotpress to INTI on Thursday as scheduled, and after about 2 hours of fiddling around with the electrical installation, we had a go of it with the strips of plastic bag that Caroline had been cutting up all morning – a task that was...

The Mighty Hotpress is Finished (almost)

We passed by Tomas Benasso’s workshop a few days ago to gaze at the finished hotpress and go over some of the minor kinks that he’s going to work out during the next 2 weeks. It’s a mighty beast of a machine and a tangible measure of one of the...

Pressing Ahead

There have been more than a few unsettling moments during the past 3 1/2 months. Most of them have to do with the recognition that we have round-trip tickets and will be leaving here, that we will be alright. But the people we work with and have grown so close to...