Canterbury Farmer Builds on 160 Years of Dairy Legacy
Gareth Hale is the current custodian of a 160-year legacy that saw his great grandfather dairying in Taranaki since the mid-1850s and grandfather dairying in the Waikato from the early 1900s.
The project brief was to build a Gator light utility vehicle using renewable, recycled, and recyclable materials. According to senior material engineer Keith Shanter, that was difficult because they had to work within the current framework of production tooling.
“We weren’t going to invest in new tooling for a product that won’t actually go to market, but we did everything we could to find sustainable materials that were suitable replacements.”
In the end, the wide variety of different materials used included soya beans for the roof and doors and seat foam. Flax and hemp fibre, wheat straw and maple wood were selected for interior panels and exterior door panels are made from sugar cane with maize cob filler. A rice hull filler was used for the dashboard and the grab handles are made from recycled fishing nets. Also water-sourced, the bonnet was made from plastic bottles pulled from the Mississippi river, while a storage compartment was made from ground coconut, adding to the list of surprising materials used to make this concept Gator.
JD has no plans to take the concept to the production stage, but one component from this project that is in Gators produced today is a defrost louvre made from recycled tyres.
