Food Processing -- Back In the Shop

Day 8:

Today was another long day at the shop. After saying goodbye to two of our teammates who had to leave the trip early, we headed to ITTU to get started. We spent the first part of the day unpacking from our weekend trip and organizing our tools and parts to make sure we can work as efficiently as possible in the time we have left.

Inspecting and sorting inventory machines

Most of the rest of the day was spent prototyping new design ideas for various parts of the grater. We are focusing mostly on making parts cheaper, faster, and more easy to assemble. Today we began parallel design experiments on nearly every component of the machine, including:

• Simplifying the grating head 
• Stiffening the plunger
• Simplifying the foot joint
• Improving chute fabrication
• Altering the handle to simplify fabrication

The QueenTech grater, for reference

Our fearless leader testing handle strength

Deborah and a Ghana National Service person working on a new head design

A freshly bent chute prototype

In an effort to speed up manufacturing, we also made flat pattern templates of all eight sheet metal parts in the grater. While fabricators had previously laid out each part by hand with squares and scribes, they can now simply trace the templates and start cutting and bending immediately.

A finished anvil (left) and plunger (right) with their respective templates

Despite being somewhat hampered by a power outage for part of the afternoon, we had a very productive day overall. The next few days will still be a mad scramble to finish everything before we head back to Boston, but we are optimistic about how much we will be able to accomplish!