Day 11:
Today was a very hectic but immensely satisfying day. It being our last day at ITTU, we knew we would have to scramble to finish everything we wanted to get done. After an intensely busy 10 hours in the shop, we hit our mark.
Working around the herd of electricians that has become a fixture at the shop, the team split up to conduct our remaining trainings. This involved cutting and bending all of the sheet metal parts of the grater and using our newly-designed jigs and fixtures to assemble parts quickly and accurately. Using our friend’s electricity again, we were able to keep our spot welder and chop saw online for the entire day. The ITTU fabricators picked everything up quite quickly, asking salient questions and making suggestions along the way.
Moving the chop saw in search of electricity
Welding a grater handle using a jig
Checking the fit on the new anvil
ITTU fabricators working on a new plunger
One benefit of running so many trainings is that we were able to produce a full grater in a single day. This new machine, built almost entirely by the ITTU fabricators and dubbed “the best grater we’ve ever made” by the team, will be kept in the shop as a reference. All new components that are produced will be checked against this machine, meaning that we will create parts that are interchangeable between machines. This hugely simplifies any service we may need to perform on deployed machines, and is a very important step forward for the pilot study. Instead of making a few machines at a time, we are moving quickly towards a more sustainable and scalable production model that will allow the venture to grow in the coming months and years.
Welding the legs onto the grater
Final assembly and transmission alignment
We owe a huge thank you to our partners at ITTU for their patience during these past few chaotic days and their willingness to go the extra mile, working into darkness today to finish our last few tasks. We will be sad to say goodbye to Kumasi tomorrow as we head back to Accra, but are looking forward to tackling some critical business challenges in the next few days that have so far taken a backseat to technical work.
The completed reference machine
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