Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Food Processing -- Back Online!

Day 10:


Today more than made up for all of the frustrations of yesterday. Getting to ITTU a little late in the morning due to traffic, we immediately set about finding a new location for our spot welder. A friend of the venture who also has a shop in Suame Magazine graciously agreed to let us use his power for the day, and we were off and running.

Making a plunger in our temporary spot welding location

Because we have made several design changes to the grater over the course of the past semester, we knew we needed to run some quick training sessions with the ITTU fabricators to go over how parts and production techniques have changed. Working with ITTU’s shop manager, we figured out which fabricators would be responsible for creating which parts of the machine and what we would need to go over with them.

Planning trainings with the shop manager

While we waited for everyone to be free for trainings, we were able to make a huge amount of progress on our design tests. In fact, we reached definitive answers on all five avenues of investigation we had begun two days ago, and have clear action items moving forward.

The new, simplified head design prototype



Because tomorrow is our last day at ITTU, we spent some time cleaning up our workspace. We also went through every failed machine part (which have been carefully kept over the years) to determine the causes of failure and alter our design and processes to prevent future issues.

A failed bearing assembly, caked in dried cassava paste

Flight testing an outdated grater chute

By this time, the ITTU fabricators were ready to begin our walkthroughs. We started with the grater chute, a relatively complex part that we altered significantly this semester. The trial went faster than expected, and very soon they had produced the best new chute we have seen to date. We ended the day on this high note, with a day packed full of more training sessions coming tomorrow. We only have one day left in Suame Magazine, but we’re moving at full speed and our to-do list is shrinking quickly!       


Walking through folding a chute

Fabricators finishing a chute front

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