After more than 10 years of nurturing an idea and nearly 5 years of relentless effort in assembling, disassembling, and restructuring, Nguyen Van Long’s mat weaving machine has won the Gold Cup for innovation at the Techmart Vietnam 2005 Fair.
Mrs. Na, the wife of the accidental weaver Nguyen Van Long (Ba Long), is an “official” weaver who has known how to make mats since she was little. Ba Long himself is a teacher from Rach Gia (Kien Giang). They met and fell in love in this region and eventually started a family together. In 1977, the couple moved under the “new economic household” policy to cultivate 42 acres of land in Hon Dat (Kien Giang).
As an urban student with a small stature, Ba Long found farming to be quite challenging. The new land was wild and undeveloped, and without knowledge of cultivation techniques, their rice crops repeatedly failed. In 1981, Ba Long moved his entire family to Ben Tre (the current residence of his family in An Hiep commune) to seek other ways to make a living. With some skills, he made a living through various jobs: from wood carving, contract work making tin boxes for Zippo lighters, to crafting coconut shell handicrafts… In the evenings, the couple would weave mats.
At that time, the payment for weaving a pair of mats was only enough to buy about 2 or 3 liters of rice. Ba Long felt that the compensation for his work was too low. With a family of four or five mouths to feed, when would they ever have any surplus? “So, while weaving, I felt unhappy, and my mind kept wandering, thinking about how one day I could weave dozens of pairs of mats. I needed a machine!” Ba Long recalled. “But I couldn’t even imagine how it would look. I would toss and turn in bed every night, unable to sleep.”
In 2000, Ba Long started assembling the machine. A small corner of his shed, where he used to lay down boards for a midday nap, turned into a “workshop” for cold processing. However, lacking funds meant that it wasn’t until a year later (in 2001) that he could add the drive components. In 2002, he attached the power motor. The machine did not operate as he had hoped: the wheels refused to “agree” with each other, and the mat clamping mechanism was out of sync… Ba Long spent all day pulling his hair out, trying to recall the mechanical knowledge he had learned 30 years earlier during his studies in mechanical engineering around 1972-1973.
By the end of 2003, the small mat weaving machine (a cubical model of about one cubic meter) was completed. But how could he turn it into a larger machine capable of weaving mats measuring 1.60 meters wide? After many days of inquiry, Ba Long approached the Ben Tre Department of Science and Technology to present his aspirations. The department agreed to grant him 16 million dong to build the machine.
After winning the award, Ba Long’s machine successfully woven a batch of trial mats. The mats achieved a smooth finish and had almost no defects. According to the design, the machine only requires one person to “feed” the mat material during operation. The mats are woven to a standard width of 1.6 meters. There are three weaving speeds: Speed 1 for beginners, weaving 5 mats per day; Speed 2 for those more experienced, weaving 10 mats per day; and Speed 3 for skilled workers, weaving 15-16 mats per day.
