Day 2:
Yesterday we arrived in Kumasi in record time and met Debbie and Asanti at TCC. After a good night’s rest, we arrived at ITTU this morning to lay out the major goals and tasks for our trip. We plan to sell more of the current press design, finalize the new press design, get NGO status, secure more funding, and improve general and long-term maintenance for our machines in the field. We also want to sell new handles for our existing presses to improve their reparability and longevity.
The tech team got to work cleaning our existing presses with our new angle grinder to get them ready to sell. We worked on optimizing our new press design that will allow us to eliminate one of the lead screws, the largest chunk of the cost of the current design out in the field. The business team worked on pricing and stock to make our new handles and a prototype of our new press design. We need to hustle to get everything finished for our community visit this weekend.
We cut a lot parts for the new press builds and handles.
There was some sanding to do on previously-built presses so they are ready to be painted.
We welded our newest prototype so we could test it.
Day 3 (morning):
Today we really got down to business. We finished QueenTech’s constitution that is necessary to become an NGO. We tested some different handle designs to find out what would be the best balance between being comfortable to use and hard to over-torque to protect the lead screws. We don’t expect all of our operators to buy new handles if theirs have yet to wear out, so we’re only bringing a few pairs to sell. The women that don’t buy them will be able to test them and will know to buy them once their handles wear out.
The picture to the left shows our painting set up. We are now able to do all of our painting at ITTU.
