CEDARVILLE, Ohio — A team of Cedarville University engineering students, which includes a Hermann resident, is building a custom-made earth mover for a hospital in Zimbabwe to keep its roads accessible and its doors open to those in need.

Nearly two years ago, Cedarville’s School of Engineering launched a senior design project to create an affordable, tractor-mounted earth mover for Karanda Mission Hospital. Now, a new team of students is bringing that vision to life, planning to complete and deliver the machine to the hospital by the end of May.

This year’s team, guided by professor of mechanical and biomedical engineering Jay Kinsinger, includes four mechanical engineering seniors: Brian Reiff (Lake Hopatcong, N.J.), Caleb Lichtenberger (Marion, Ohio), Hunter Laurell (Lakeland, Fla.) and Kaleb Johnson (Hermann, Mo.). Their mission is to turn last year’s prototype into a fully functional machine that can be sent to Karanda by the end of the school year. This process involves refining the previous design, making changes and constructing the earth mover at full scale.

Karanda Mission Hospital serves the physical and spiritual needs of Zimbabwe’s northwest region. Due to the hospital’s remote location away from heavily populated areas, reliable road access is critical. During Zimbabwe’s rainy season, dirt roads leading to the hospital are often washed away, severely impacting Karanda’s ability to provide care.

The hospital needed an earth mover that could be attached to its tractor to efficiently repave roads. This concept was brought to Cedarville by Ken Atkinson, a former missionary in Zimbabwe who now works as an engineering lab technician at the university. A senior design team started the project in 2023 by designing a prototype that could be built at a fraction of the cost that an industrial-grade earth mover would demand.

After a year of work, the initial class of engineering students built a one-tenth scale model that is serving this year’s students as the blueprint for the final product.

“These guys are hands-on kinds of workers, and they’re doing a tremendous job,” said Kinsinger. “They’re doing a lot of design work that wasn’t covered last semester because the last team just didn’t have the parts in place that we are working with now. So we’re building it and smoothing the design out all at once.”

One of the team’s greatest challenges is ensuring quality while keeping costs low. While new industrial earth movers could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, this Cedarville team is dedicated to producing this machine for Karanda at a much smaller charge. Providing free labor and utilizing affordable parts and materials through students’ ingenuity and resourcefulness were factors in maintaining the cost.

“The team located a grader blade from an army surplus bulldozer in Kentucky through Facebook Marketplace,” said Kinsinger. “We had budgeted up to $2,000 for that component, and they were able to acquire it for $700. These guys are all about finding good value to keep Karanda’s costs down.”

With the project on track for completion by the end of the 2024-25 school year, one final challenge remains: transporting the earth mover to Zimbabwe. Kinsinger and his team are exploring cost-effective shipping options to ensure the machine reaches the people who need it.

“We’re finishing building this amazing machine, so the last step will be finding a way deliver it to the hospital,” said Kinsinger. “It’s taken us a lot of ingenuity and work to ensure that this project can stay within its small budget, so I have no doubt we’ll find a way to solve the issue of transportation.”

Through the hard work of two senior design teams, the funding of countless donors and the supervision and dedication of Cedarville’s staff and mentors, the Karanda Mission Hospital will soon be able to ensure open roads and ease of transportation to continue its vital work in Zimbabwe.

Cedarville University is an evangelical Christian institution in southwest Ohio.