4

Homeless Brazilian Man Builds His Own Car From Scrap

via jalopnik.com

Generally, to hold down a job, one has to show up to work. If you don't have access to cheap, reliable public transportation, your own vehicle, or really, really strong legs, you're out of luck. Homeless Brazilian man Orismar de Souza vowed to do something about that. He starved himself for months, saving up every last panhandled penny to accumulate the several hundred dollars needed to stock up on scrap metal. Then he -- a man with absolutely no former experience in metalwork -- used a borrowed hammer and chisel to fashion a pile of raw metal into a viable mode of transport.

via jalopnik.com
No seatbelts, air bags, or turn signals, but he had time to wire a radio and tape deck.

Now, this ain't no Lamborghini -- powered by a measly 125cc motorcycle engine that de Souza scavenged from a junkyard, it manages only about 50 miles per hour on its best day. Still, the car has improved de Souza's life exponentially. Thanks to his newfound mobility, he was able to land himself a job in the local sugarcane fields.

via jalopnik.com
"How much of your paycheck did you blow on your car payment? Haha, suckers."

3

Teen Builds a Radio Station for His Sierra Leone Community

THNKR

In Freetown, Sierra Leone, week-long power outages are the norm. Fortunately for one community in this tiny West African country, there are whiz kids like Kelvin Doe. Doe's electrical proficiency came about by necessity: at 13 years old, he got sick and tired of reading by candlelight, so he gathered up some acid, soda, metal, and duct tape and whipped up his own goddamn battery, which he used to power a lamp ... which, of course, he also built. No one who lives near Doe has purchased a mass-made battery since.

THNKR
"Just blow in it, wiggle it around some." -the extent of our childhood technical knowledge

Next, he built a generator from a rusty voltage stabilizer, which may as well be a flux capacitor for all we understand of it. Why does a teenager need a generator? Well, when he's not MacGyvering complicated electronics from shit he found in the garbage, Doe dreams of being a DJ. Most DJs these days simply don some ironic sunglasses, show up at a bar, stand in the corner, and open up iScratch on their MacBook. Doe had to cobble together his own FM radio station just so he could spin there. Now Doe not only entertains the entire neighborhood, he even employs his friends.

THNKR
Whom he also built and wired.

2

Cuban Farmer Creates Farming Tools From Trash

Colors Magazine

Farming is back-breaking work even with the best of tools. If you have only the most rudimentary ones, or worse -- nothing at all -- you're not technically "farming" so much as you're praying to the dirt. Fortunately for one rural Cuban community, they have Yolando Perez Baez, the lost lovechild of MacGyver, Doctor Octopus, and Oscar the Grouch.

Reuters/Desmond Boylan
He's one coconut radio away from adding The Professor to his titles.

Baez roots through the local garbage dump and assembles the trash he finds into incredible farming machines. One of his most successful contraptions is a crop fumigator that has reduced fumigation time from six hours to one. Plus, it makes you look like you're being attacked by a sentient penny-farthing, and that makes it A-OK in our book.

Reuters/Desmond Boylan
According to Christopher Nolan, he's the one who will save humanity after the apocalypse.

1

Chinese Man Builds His Own Dialysis Machine

telegraph.co.uk

A dialysis machine filters a person's blood when their kidneys can't do the job. Obviously, that's a monumental task, and it takes an equally monumental machine to do it -- one roughly the size of a Fiat.

Moscvitch via Wikipedia
Kidneys are a decidedly more convenient size.