Design and construction of a manually operated simsim thresher.

Abstract

Simsim is a small white nutritious oil seed with ready markets. It is produced by smallholder farmers. With the recent surge in demand, simsim farmers in Uganda have turned increasingly growing simsim as a cash crop. The major characteristics considered by simsim buyers and sellers are the seed color aroma and cleanliness. Besides problems of volume, small-scale production presents challenges of quality control, including adulteration with soil during threshing, which makes it difficult to meet the stringent standards required to access premium markets. Threshing manually by the rudimental traditional method of beating on the ground is tedious, time consuming, labor intensive and results in simsim adulteration with. soil. The adulteration with the soil leads to contamination by microorganism in the soils and affects the color and cleanliness of the seeds. The main objective of this project is -to design and construct a manually operated simsim thresher, and test the capacity and efficiency of the proto-type. This project primarily focused on small holders’ producers of simsim and was limited to design, construction and on station testing of the simsim thresher. The following considerations was be made immaterial selection in order to optimize the fabrication of the thresher; quality (mechanical strength), suitability to working condition, availability, manufacturability and -cost. Other parameters like weight and Size of- seeds, length of sheaves and moisture content of the simsim was also be: considered. The fully Constructed prototype was be tested for output and evaluated economically and the 77.2kg of simsim was threshed per hour.