The design and construction of a manually operated loaf bread slicing machine.

Abstract

Bread is common fast food in Uganda and is usually taken on breakfast or evening tea or even packed for school going. children and working class people, Its consumption cuts across all classes of people. For easy serving and easy consumption, bread is sliced to meet the consumption needs and packaging needs in the shortest time possible. There are different types of bread slicing machines on market but they are electrical machines, which makes it unfavorable for local bakeries ill the absence of electricity and yet there is need for continuous production. Therefore, this study was aimed at designing and constructing of a manually operated bread slicing machine that does not use electricity in operation and can be operated manually without any source of power and yet does not compromise the standard quality of the sliced bread. The machine was designed with an output capacity of 72 loaves/hr. and efficiency of 98.18% which was measured basing on. quality of the bread sliced. And quality was due to the amount of bread cramps generated while slicing. The more the. amount of bread cramps collected as a result of slicing a specific number of loaves of bread, the lower the quality of the sliced bread and the lower the efficiency of the machine. The prototype (the manual bread slicing machine) was designed, fabricated, assembled, tested and economically evaluated. From the results of the experiments tarried out, the output capacity was found to be- 3 loaves per minute and the bread cramps percentage was found to, be approximately 2% of the average initial weight of the loaves before slicing. This signifies good quality slicers