Gandhi's Spinning Wheel X-Prize (The Ambar Charkha) 

Very nice idea... And just add a motor to it and voila... local mill in our own house! Amazing potential...

This chakra could be an element of the “150 Mile Wardrobe,” communities learning how to create their textile needs from within 150 miles. This means fiber growers, mini wool and cotton mills, localized spinning collectives, and village weavers. People making their own clothes and shoes. This is how we cut down on the carbon footprint of our necessities. This also includes upcycling used clothing, ala the Japanese ethic of Boro Mottanai, which creates beauty and durability out of rags. Remember how our grandmothers made patchwork quilts. Taking all this to the next RELOCALIZED level. Yay!

This sort of synthesis is my favorite part about your channel! Thank you! Also, if you haven't already you should read Kropotkin. Starting to notice a lot of your ideas and discussions about personal/communal liberation resonate with passages I remember from The Conquest of Bread

Thank you. Never seen an Amber Charkha before! I have and use a book charkha, spinning wheels, weaving looms, grow a few cotton bushes to experiment with but mainly use alpaca or wool for my textile work since I can grow them easily on the farm :) Keen to see how you go with the 3D printing.

Probably part of the hand-crank allure is deeper; I would assume it's more an Amish-style desire to be able to create the machines at home too. But agreed that could be modernized with 3d printing. Solar panels are a little tricky because we can't yet make them locally, but perhaps having the quality of an adapter for manual or electric would alleviate the concern.

This is a wonderful Idea! If you can combine it with a treadle or pedal power, so I can just sit comfortably and spin. this leaves my hands free to fix anything that might go wrong and the foot power will spin this much faster than a hand crank. PLEASE, Keep me informed!

"He who spins before the poor, inviting them to do likewise, serves God as no one else does." - Gandhi

Hello. Just found your video today. I have also been researching on charkha. I think its a wonderful machine. Bringing production locally empowers the people. Whether it is hand cranked or solar powered, it should remain true to its concept. It should also be be build locally by the people. I got into 3d printing because i am into spinning and weaving natural cotton fiber. So far, i have only printed a drop spindle and boat shuttle. I am also hoping to print my ambar charkha some day. I also think 3d printer is another industrial revolution bringing manufacturing capability to home scale. Looking forward for more of your videos. Thank you.

Informative and interesting as always

I would love to help! I’m not great at designing, but I can see what I can do.

That would be cool to have made

I am completely interested. I am a weaver and spinner. I work mostly in wool. I don't know how I could help, but I would love to!

I've been missing your videos because I forgot to click the bell. I fully agree and this is something I've been focussing on for years. Decentralised manufacturing is the next big step humanity needs to take, give it a few years and we will be able to download a car. 3D printing, CNC mills and a few other devices have gotten so cheap now that pretty much anyone can have a home toolshop capable of making almost anything mechanical. Clothes are another step, but not a huge one. I think medical care is going to be a huge hurdle, and it'll be a much bigger one because of how entrenched the pharmaceutical industry is with IP laws and the healthcare service industry with professional monopolies. Take those away and centralised production/services will die a hard death. Child labour is a non-issue in my view. It's something that will only happen wherever an economy is poor enough that adults cannot feed a full family of children up to the age of 18. The moment they can child labour ends. In an economy where it's a necessity it's unavoidable and cannot be prevented by passing laws. The solution is simple: Industrialise the economy to the point where it's unnecessary. Regarding your specific step of 3D printing the ambar charkha... I'd refer you to the experience of the reprap community. Their initial goal was to make a 3D printer that could print itself. But along the way they realised that certain parts were just easier and cheaper to buy premade, like supporting rods and hot-ends. I think you should adopt the same approach: 3D print the parts that aren't available off the shelf (like certain portions of the chassis, or thread guides) and use widely available off the shelf parts (like gears and rods) where appropriate. I'd also like to suggest maybe focussing on another fiber other than cotton. Cotton has a quite limited growing range, it's only really feasible in warm regions with plenty of water. Anywhere with frost or scant supplies of water would have difficulty. A better option might be flax or even wool (depending on if you're trying to make it vegan or not). Sheep can graze damn near anywhere and produce all the fiber you could want. The processing steps required are similar.

Very interesting idea indeed (I'll get in touch)

To the hand crank point, or powered by solar... for them you added a new problem how to power it locally, as making solar panels that provide a dense enough power output isn't easy. But they do have lots of roof space for the time being.

I think the parallel here isn’t necessarily in making thread at home but making filament. We need an automated spinning wheel of filament.

For additional reference to your ambar charkha project. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-sw9ixRT2AbA.html I find manually carding cotton (using a pair of carder) the most tedious task in hand spinning. I think having a sliver or roving machine is great addition to cottage industry. But i don't think it can remove debris frpm the fiber.

i want to build a wide loom from an old grill awning that isn't being used... i hope to increase cotton yarn production and my brain says 'go go go!' i've seen women using paddles to hold poonis. I'm thinking i can spin two rovings on a paddle with two separate spindles on my frankenbike charkha. I'm all about reusing and/or 'upcycling'. trash/treasure. It would instantly double my production...

For the contrary view on the politics of the charkha, see cscs.res.in/dataarchive/textfiles/textfile.2008-03-25.5189546146/file Tagore claimed that the symbol swallowed the thing it symbolized - and in large measure, he was right. The charkha is today more a religious totem than a tool.

I love mormons.

I want to know you!!

Heres an idea for alternate sources of energy: Gravity powered escapement wheel: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UEE9vOwx0is.html I was wondering if we can connect a home-made generator to it and make electricity with it... Could you try this project? Please... 😊

Do you have an engineering degree?

The problem with all of this is that it’s completely uneconomic both in terms of making sense from an economic standpoint but also in terms of violating the concept of division of labor efficiency. Just as it makes no sense for each person to build her own car it doesn’t really make sense for people to make their own clothes. It has to be heavily subsidized to be even superficially viable which means it takes money from one section of the economy and inefficiently forces it into another section of the economy. Therefore it drags down the sections of the economy that are more inherently successful etc. We all know that free trade has dragged over 1 billion people out of povertyIn the last 40 years, mostly in China and India. This technology although super cool represents the antithesis of that progress. Does it really matter if people make their own clothes if it means that they are overall much poorer than they would’ve been under other circumstances?

Sounds like it's time to travel to india and get one of these and reverse engineer it lol

I'm not sure how much this will help, but I found an image on wikimedia commons with labels in what Google translate calls Marathi and numbers for the gear teeth/size. commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Structure_of_Amber_Charkha.jpg