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BYU senior Nathan Toone adjusts a part on a human powered drill Thursday, Mar. 31, 2011 at the BYU Capstone Final Presentations in the Wilkinson Center in Provo. The "village drill", designed and built by BYU students, uses manpower and upward pressure to drill for water as deep as 250 feet below the ground. ANDREW VAN WAGENEN/Daily Herald

Ashley Franscell

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BYU senior Nathan Toone attaches a section to a human powered drill during a demonstration Thursday, Mar. 31, 2011 at the BYU Capstone Final Presentations in the Wilkinson Center in Provo. The "village drill", designed and built by BYU students, uses manpower and upward pressure to drill for water up to 250 feet below the ground. ANDREW VAN WAGENEN/Daily Herald

Ashley Franscell

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BYU seniors Sabin Guatam, left and Nathan Toone demonstrate the workings of a human powered drill Thursday, Mar. 31, 2011 at the BYU Capstone Final Presentations in the Wilkinson Center in Provo. The "village drill", designed and built by BYU students, uses manpower and upward pressure to drill for water as deep as 250 feet below the ground. ANDREW VAN WAGENEN/Daily Herald

Ashley Franscell

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PROVO — Imagine spending your senior year working on a boring project.

Six BYU engineering students did just that when they created a drill that is capable of boring 250 feet into the ground to find water.

“We’re confident that our design is going to be able to do that,” team leader Ken Langley said.

In September, Langley, Nathan Toone, Devin LeBaron, Jimmy Stacey, Sabin Gautum and Eric Janmohamed were told that rural cities in Africa needed water. Traditional wells were too expensive. As their capstone project, they had to build a well that was easy to assemble and use and that could drill far enough down to reach aquifers. It needed to run on human power. None of the six of them, plus faculty coach Chris Mattson, had drilled before.

“They gave us the problem and then they said figure out how to do it,” he said.

They started researching, and then they started building. Prototype No. 1 involved gym weights and got a few inches down. Prototype No. 3 was made entirely of wood. The day they drilled six feet in Mattson’s backyard was a victory because they broke through more than the surface.

The point of each of those prototypes wasn’t to solve the big problem, Mattson said. Instead, they were learning how to drill and solving small problems — getting the drill into the ground, getting it out, supplying enough torque to break through rock. They also talked to people who had built and operated drills before.

“Otherwise, we’re reinventing the wheel,” Mattson said. “In this case we invented a wheel, but it wasn’t a reinvention.”

Out of this process, the successful drill was born: a machine that looks like a cross between a trebuchet and a merry-go-round. It weighs about 1,200 pounds, requires four people but no additional machinery to operate and should have the capacity to bore through 250 feet of whatever earth is underneath it.

It wasn’t anything like team member Eric Janmohamed had in mind when he fond out about the project. What he first thought, when he found out their assignment, was that it was way too big for them to do. He couldn’t imagine where to begin, let alone how it would end.

So they started researching and testing and drilling. It took months before they realized turning a wheel would be the most efficient method. It took an hour and a half to drill 30 feet into the ground.

“This is a necessity for them,” he said.

WHOLives.org was the catalyst behind the drill. Founder John Renouard said his nonprofit organization is focused on improving health and opportunities to rural villages. They’re attacking those bigger problems largely through the water supply.

“There’s just no way to get people out of poverty without clean water,” Renouard said. “It’s just not possible.”

Most villagers either pull water out of streams, which usually are contaminated by upstream animal use, or big digging wells, which generally still rely on surface water because they can’t get deep enough. The contaminated water leads to illness, which in many cases means unavoidable death.

“There’s just nothing to stop the dehydration at that point,” he said.

The drill will actually be built in the countries to avoid tariffs and shipping costs; BYU is supplying the engineering drawings and a user manual. It’s small enough that it could fit in the back of a truck for transport or could even be packed in by a dozen people to the most remote villages. Once WHOLives.org is able to secure funding, they’ll start building, Renouard said.

“It’s a game changer,” he said.