Home / Series / Primitive Technology / Aired Order / Season 2024 / Episode 8

Water Bellows (uses water instead of leather)

I built a Water Bellows. It’s an upside-down clay pot with an inlet valve and an outlet spout. The inlet valve is simply a hole in the pot with a leaf plastered to the inside with wet clay so that it forms a one-way flap valve. When pushed down into water, the valve shuts and air is forced out of the spout and into the fire. When the pot is lifted in water, air is sucked in through the open inlet valve and the cycle repeats. I got the idea from a Food and Agriculture Organization website I saw years ago. A Google image search for “FAO water bellows” gives an image of someone using a more complicated version at a brick forge in Zimbabwe, possibly from 1994, but I can no longer find the original diagram or description. From memory, the air and water containers were steel drums and there was a U-shaped pipe to convey the air down from inside the air drum when lowered, through and out the water drum and into the fire. Air entered an inlet valve in the top of the air drum when lifted. The

English
  • Originally Aired August 1, 2024
  • Runtime 11 minutes
  • Network YouTube
  • Created August 3, 2024 by
    beniroc1977eus
  • Modified August 3, 2024 by
    beniroc1977eus