Food Processing -- Powering Through

Day 9:

Today was an exercise in patience and adaptation. Arriving at ITTU in the morning as usual, we picked up working where we had left off. The power outage yesterday meant that we weren’t able to complete the assembly of a number of welded sheet metal parts, and we had them lined up and ready to go as soon as we got in. However, despite the other electric devices in the shop working, our spot welder would not. We then began a painful debugging process that took most of the day and involved two electricians, an analog multimeter, and several calls to support centers in the US. After ruling out all other options, we were able to determine that ITTU’s already-suspect power (which tends to range from 220 to 250V, depending on which socket you use) had been thrown further out of whack during the outage and was simply not enough to support the welding operations we were trying to accomplish. We identified some other shops that would let us use their power, but by then the day was ending and we had to close up.

Probing for clues inside the spot welder

As we worked on getting the critical spot welder back up and running, we were able to accomplish a number of other tasks (sans electricity, while the electricians tinkered) that have been on our docket. First, we spent some time cleaning and organizing the venture’s inventory at ITTU. This meant tossing outdated drawings, updating hardware and miscellaneous parts, and finding a home for any parts that are no longer used in our machines. It was great to reduce the clutter in our storage space and remove any possible confusion between machine configurations.

Next, we put in some time configuring commercial, off-the-shelf parts to create the bearing assemblies that hold the head shaft in the grater. Many hands made light work and we quickly processed all of the components we had, enough to make another 20 graters.

Pressing together bearing assemblies

With the welder still down, we moved on to dealing with some machines which were unsellable due to large manufacturing errors. These we sorted and processed, salvaging what we could and learning a great deal about how we can improve our production processes and avoid mistakes in the future.

Removing an improperly welded chute

Prototyping alternate fabrication techniques

After we had finished with the machines, we ended the day with a very productive meeting to plan out the next few days before we return to Boston, as well as tasks we will complete when we get home to support our teammates in Kumasi.

While today certainly included its share of frustrations, we are happy to have a clear path forward and a significant amount of time left to work in Ghana.