Canterbury-based inventor and TikTok star Kenny Paton spends a lot of time creating crazy and wonderful things, but he hopes his latest creation can serve a very practical purpose: cleaning up plastic from our beaches.
On the TikTok account Paton Machines, Kenny shares videos in which he motors everyday objects such as roller skates, wheelbarrows and tool carts.
He told Jesse Mulligan of RNZ that he had always been interested in machines and how they work.
“Only recently did I realize that if my family complained I would take things apart and never put them back together again.
“I’d always told them it was to work things out, but I think it was more about finding out how it failed and how it worked.”
One of his earliest inventions was a motorized scooter made with a chainsaw motor.
He also particularly enjoys his motorized pencil sharpener, which is “more of a pencil shredder than a pencil sharpener, but by the time you have enough fun with it”.
“This is one of the earlier ones I’ve built recently. [I] had a weed eater motor and a pencil sharpener that was attached to the front and I think it was supposed to look artistically like a pencil sharpener on a tabletop… and light it up and stick a pencil in it.
After seeing other engineers on TikTok, Kenny decided to use the social media platform to showcase his own creations.
†[It helps] to have an audience asking about your projects, holding you on a leash to actually finish them, which helps to have that responsibility and get you a little more motivated to get them done.”
One of Kenny’s most popular videos is about what he believes to be his most practical invention: the motorized wheelbarrow.
“I took an engine off a moped… and bolted it to the front of the wheelbarrow and then a little dolly behind it for you to stand on. I think it must be good for 50 [kilometres] an hour, but I haven’t really been working to get to that speed yet.”
Kenny’s new motorized sand sifter is made from a simple office trash can and was inspired by a request from the Stuff website KEA Kids News.
“I thought yeah, well, there’s a cool idea. So I slapped that together with an old office trash can, the one with the mesh style, and of course I put a motor on it… [and] a belt to drive the waste around so that it spins and sifts sand.
“That gave me the idea to maybe build a bigger one as well and I thought maybe it would be good to go to the beach and have a little fun with it.
“But only recently, after I looked at it a bit, I thought, wait a minute, there’s a need out there to clean up the plastic that actually comes from the industrial parts of Christchurch, where I’m at, and maybe [with] a little more design in there and maybe I can find something that will really do a job there.”
Kenny is eager to involve environmentalists in the development of his sand sieving machine and will share its progress on his social media channels.
“It also gives it a little bit more purpose, not just something that you build and put on the shelf and look at.”