Untrained workers toiling at a makeshift assembly line Saturday performed the simplest of tasks: bending resistors, cutting strips of metal, cleaning pieces of plastic with Formula 409. The only machinery was a hand-held electric drill.

As for the cost, you can't beat free labor.

About 70 volunteers showed up at Tackle Design, a small industrial design and engineering research-and-development firm, to perform these menial tasks over and over, all for a good cause: producing ultra-low-cost phototherapy lights designed to treat jaundice in developing countries.

"It's not glorious work, but it's good work," said volunteer Meghan Pino, a 22-year-old Durham resident, as she attached resistors to a piece of rubber.

The genesis of Saturday's manufacturing session was a business-plan contest conducted at Duke University. The competition's goal is to devise low-cost medical equipment for developing countries.

The lights produced Saturday will sell for several hundred dollars, versus several thousand dollars for those in use now.

Vijay Anand, who won last year's contest shortly before he graduated from Duke's Pratt School of Engineering with a master's degree in engineering management, conceived of the low-cost phototherapy lights. He received $100,000 in prize money to establish a nonprofit group, PhotoGenesis, that will commercialize and distribute the devices.

Jaundice, which afflicts newborns when their livers can't filter a waste product called bilirubin, can cause severe brain damage if unchecked. But the condition is easily treated with a few days of light therapy, said Chuck Messer, a partner at Tackle Design. The problem is that the special lights needed to neutralize bilirubin have been prohibitively expensive for developing countries, which try to make do with old refurbished devices that often don't last long.

"The cost of ... [a PhotoGenesis light] is under the cost of refurbishing," said Anand, who has been urging U.S. nonprofit organizations to buy the product and donate it to developing countries.

The lights were originally designed by Duke engineering students. But Messer, who was one of the judges of the Duke competition, was so taken by the concept that he volunteered to refine the design and further slash costs.

For the past year, Messer has collaborated with Anand and Engineering World Health, a program based at Duke that each summer trains and dispatches students from across the country to developing countries to repair broken medical equipment. Duke's contest is an offshoot of Engineering World Health.

The manufacturing process was still being tweaked Saturday. One volunteer assigned to strip electrical wiring suggested buying a $20 tool at Home Depot that would enable him to do a better, faster job. Someone from Tackle Design promptly left to buy one.

"That improved the situation dramatically," said Messer, who noted that the manufacturing process took longer than anticipated.

Some of the volunteers had a personal connection to jaundice, because either they or their children had it as an infant. Others were friends of the people behind the project who saw an opportunity to aid a friend and do good all at once.

The project is so appealing that Rep. David Price and Durham Mayor Bill Bell, attending the Durham County Democratic convention in the nearby county courthouse, made an unscheduled visit to Tackle Design after they got wind of it.

"It's ingenious," marveled Price after he was briefed by Messer and his partner, Jon Kuniholm.

Three-and-a-half hours after the first shift of volunteers began bending, cutting and fastening, Messer plugged in the first completed light system and raised it high. "First light, guys!" he hollered.

That was payoff enough for these otherwise uncompensated laborers, who whooped and applauded in appreciation.

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