HEIRLOOM TECHNOLOGY

By Tim Anderson

Maker Family Portrait

A family of inventive blacksmiths in Indonesia supply the locals with just about everything they need.

»

At the far western tip of Papua, on the outskirts of the town of Sorong, is a place called Tempat Garam (“salt-making place”). The Mombrasar family (pictured at right) of blacksmiths have their shop there. They build boats, make any and all kinds of tools, and invent labor-saving devices.

Chainsaw-Powered Sago Grinder Yohanis Mombrasar showed me one of the family’s inventions, a chainsaw-powered sago grinder (Figure A). The local staple is sago palm starch. The sago palm grows in dense stands in freshwater swamps just behind a barrier beach. The pith of the trunk is composed of starch and fibers.

Big chainsaws are plentiful here because of the timber industry. The area has valuable hardwoods sought by Malaysian Chinese traders.

The traditional method of making sago starch is to fell a sago log and pound the insides with wooden hammers until the starch grains are separated from the fibers. (I’ve read that even that way, it’s one-tenth as much labor as rice cultivation.) With a power tool like this, it would take very little time to process large quantities.

The Product Line

Pandai besi means “blacksmith” in the Bahasa Indonesia language. Just like our word, it literally means “iron pounder.”

This sign (Figure B) shows some of the things that someone in this family is ready to make at any time, including axes, a huge variety of knives and machetes, spear points, sickles, chisels, and all kinds of hardware.

The local stores carry mass-produced machetes and sickles like we have, but no one wants them. The local people appreciate a finely crafted steel tool made exactly to suit the work they do.

154 Make: Volume 18

ALL IN THE FAMILY: (L–R) Vincent Ambrar, Fredison Mombrasar, Andreas Mombrasar, Elisabet Dimara, Delilah Mombrasar. The kids were moving around too much for me to get their names straight.

This price list (Figure C) shows how much the family’s major products cost and how many they can make in a month. It’s an impressively well-organized operation.

The Forge

It was their day off, but Elisabet Dimara and Andreas Mombrasar kindly offered to show me how their forge works. It’s a very sociable operation.

Elisabet sits on the throne and works the bellows (Figure D). It’s a piston pump made from two sections of water pipe and some wooden piston plungers. The gasket material is very soft and hangs down on the upstroke, allowing air to pass around it. It looks like a soft foam. I’ve also seen gaskets made from many layers of woven plastic bags.

Tuyère is the English word, from French, for the pipe that blows air into a forge. Some call it a tweer. Theirs is made exactly as it appears; two small pipes,