The Mine Kafon: A Low-Cost, Wind-Powered Minefield Clearing Device Hits Kickstarter

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We brought you a video back at the end of November that showed off Massoud Hassani’s mine-clearing device, the Mine Kafon, based on a wind-powered child’s toy. Now, the Afghan industrial designer has taken the suggestions of a number of our commenters and put the project on Kickstarter. Hassani is looking for £100,000 to make the Kafons and document the process.

While the Mine Kafon is cheaper to produce than more traditional methods of clearing minefields, owing to rather simplified construction using bamboo that harnesses wind motor for locomotion, Hassani still needs startup funds to get the project going at a scale where it will be useful to residents of his home country of Afghanistan, and other war-torn locations where there are still hundreds of buried mines left to be cleared. The Kickstarter project is designed to take Hassani’s concept and make it a practically deployable device.

The funding will go to bettering the engineering of the basic prototype, including improvements to GPS accuracy and improvement of overall durability (the Kafon is intended to survive multiple mine detonations, not just one), as well as mold-making and fabrication costs. It also accounts for money set aside for providing backer rewards, which include lamps designed by Hassani which use the same mold that creates the Mine Kafon’s feet. Finally, some of the budget will go towards a film documenting the construction and deployment process.

This is one of those rare hardware Kickstarter projects where backers won’t walk away with the shipping device (though you do get a 1/4th scale model at the £5,000 pledge level). But the point is that for most who back this, you won’t likely be in a position to actually need the Mine Kafon’s services. Usually there’s a degree of risk with backing Kickstarter projects, but in this case, even if it helps put only one Mine Kafon on the ground, the risk is more than justified.

Mine Kafon Helps Clear Mine Fields Cheaply

Product designer Massoud Hassani has come up with a rather ingenious method of clearing up mines from minefields. The Mine Kafon is Massoud’s graduate project, and it looks set to be featured at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where it will be fettered as a cheap (and some might even consider it to be beautiful) way of clearing mine fields. Massoud Hassani’s story is not that of being born with a silver spoon, but rather, being raised in Afghanistan, a country which has plenty of land mines, proved to inspire him to create the Mine Kafon that was inspired by the different toys that he crafted during his youth, including light, tumbleweed-like objects which he and other neighborhood kids would race against each other.

The toys would sometimes roll into the mine fields, rendering them useless (or rather, foolhardy to be retrieved). Upon his father’s death, Hassani and family immigrated to the Netherlands. The Mine Kafon is built on an entirely larger scale compared to his childhood toys, being nearly as tall as an adult male. Made out of plastic and bamboo, it will cost 40 Euros a pop, which is a whole lot more affordable than other solutions. Each bamboo spine comes with a suction cup which amplifies the weight of the Kafon as the wind blows it around, and individual Kafons are strong enough to withstand up to four mine blasts before losing too many spines to roll about. There will be GPS chips within each Kafon, paving the way to enable remote tracking of where mines have yet to be cleared, as well as the areas where they’ve been cleared.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Intellipaper USB Paper Drive, Blood Pressure Monitor Loses Cuff,

This Wind-Powered Rolling Tentacle Ball Can Clear Landmines

Though it looks like a weapon from a generic machines vs man sci-fi movie, the Mine Kafon is actually a genius landmine clearer. Designed by Massoud Hassani, all you have to do is push the tentacle ball into a field of landmines and it can trigger mines to safely explode. More »