Chinese farmer Sun Jifa, 51, of Guanmashan, Jilin province, in northern China, was maimed as a result of a blast fishing bomb exploding prematurely. He lost both hands. “I survived, but I had no hands,” he explained.
That’s when Jifa decided to take matters into his own hands, literally. He built his own pair of bionic hands so he could continue to work on his family farm. “I couldn’t afford to buy the false hand the hospital wanted me to have, so I decided to make my own,” Jifa says. He spent eight years handcrafting prototypes before finally creating metal hands that could grip and hold. The devices depend on a series of wires and pulleys inside, and are controlled by movements in his elbows. “I control them with movements from my elbows and I can work, love normally and feed myself just like anyone else.”
“The only drawback is that steel is quite heavy so they’re tiring to wear and get hot or cold in the extremes of summer and winter,” Jifa said. Jifa wants to also help other similarly disabled people, so he plans to create more of these bionic hands. “I made this from scrap metal for virtually nothing. There is no need to pay hospitals a fortune,” he says.