Dutch designer Dave Hakkens has devised a wind-powered oil press for making nuts and seeds into homemade oils (+ movie).
Called Windoil, the press relies solely on wind power and can be used to process nuts and seeds such as walnuts, hazlenuts, and linseeds, or whatever can be found locally.
Once the nuts have been gathered and placed into the funnel of the press the wind rotates the metal fins, powering the gear mechanism to grind the nuts and extract the oil.
The remaining pulp of the nut or seed can be used in cooking, as animal feed or as compost.
Hakkens claims the bottle in the movie above took just 60 nuts.
See all our stories about food here and Hakkens' earlier stackable plugs project here.
Here's some more information from the designer:
I like good food! Food which is made in the right way with good ingredients. Usually this is home made food. But his often takes a lot of time and energy which makes it expensive.
I made an oil pressing machine which works only on wind energy. The machine is made to press nuts and seeds such as walnuts, peanuts, sesame seeds, linseeds, hazelnuts. The wind power is transformed with a worm drive to make the movement slow but very powerful.
First I gather some nuts and put them in the machine. When the machine starts pressing I just sit back and relax. The leftover pulp is full of protein, great for cooking or feed your animals and plants with. The machine doesn't use heat which means good pure cold pressed oil is produced.
The oil is put into old glass bottles, labeled and sealed with a cork. The only thing I need to pay for is a cork and a label, the rest is just for free...