Final Prototype

We wanted to create a final prototype with plastic sides so the community in Nicaragua could potentially create a water distiller kit themselves, as it would be nice to have several different options that the community could choose from.

With this goal in mind, we measured all the pieces and cut them. We first tried cutting the plastic pieces using a plastic cutter knife, however, it was extremely difficult. We ending up using a machine in the machine shop, which wasn't great, as this wouldn't happen in Nicaragua. However, Amy said that the people there were very handy and could probably figure something out. With that in mind, we went ahead with our plan.

We took two of our plastic pieces and used a hand drill to drill a hole in each of them: One for letting in water, one for letting out water. We originally thought of using plastic water bottles for the nozzles of the water distiller, however, we found they were much weaker and could potentially let out water. Therefore, we decided to use soda bottles.

We then cut a plastic Pepsi bottle for the nozzle and the cap, took off the cap and the small plastic ring, and put the nozzle piece inside the drilled hole, and screwed the cap back on. This would be used for letting out water.

For letting in water, we sliced a plastic coke bottle diagonally so that the cap would be at an angle and it would be easier to pour in water.

We then glued everything together minus the glass top. We first used tape to fasten the cut plastic pieces together and then glued the pieces from the inside using a silicone adhesive (as this would be the glue they would have in Nicaragua). We also glued both soda bottle pieces and waited a day to let the glue dry.

After the glued dried, we took the tape off and tested if the container would hold water. It was indeed leaking, and we had to fill in all the holes we saw and wait a bit longer to test again. A second run-through showed that it was still leaking; there were places in the corners of the container and the water was leaking from the "letting out" water bottle cap as well. We had to keep gluing to make sure we stopped all the leaks.

We came to the conclusion that silicone adhesive was not the best material from stopping water flow, as even though we put massive amounts of glue, we couldn't stop all the leaks. Also, the adhesive was extremely messing and not very aesthetically pleasing at all. We ended up scraping much of the silicone off and using hot glue to seal the holes, which eventually worked.

Our final product: