Design and construction of a manually operated Sukuma wiki Slicing Machine

Abstract

Sukuma wiki slicing is done mainly by women using a hand knife which is tedious, labor intensive and time consuming especially for bulk production. Their different of manual slicers on market but most of them are for home use and the electric operated slicers are not convenient for village setting where there is no electricity yet expensive. Therefore, this study was aimed at designing and constructing a manually operated sukuma wiki slice that will be used by both men and women and still maintain the quality of the sliced product and facilitate bulk production for homes, schools, hotels and business. The machine was designed with an output capacity of 4kg/hr and efficiency of 642% over the hand knife slicing method from the test results, it clearly shows that the fabricated vegetable slicing machine is more effective and efficient in terms of slicing as compared to hand knife-slicing. The operation and maintenance of the machine is easy and it was designed and fabricated using the readily available, reliable and affordable materials.