Design And Fabrication Of Chin-Chin Cutting Machine

1.1 INTRODUCTION
Chin Chin is a fried snack from West Africa and is nowadays very popular in many places around the world. It is a crunchy fried dough of wheat flour and some other baking ingredients. In West Africa, Chin Chin usually contains cowpeas flour, and ground nutmeg is often added for flavor.
In Nigerian homes, restaurants, outdoor catering services and snacks centers, cutting operation is usually carried out manually. It is energy and time consuming, tedious, a high risk and back straining operation. Developing a rotary cutter locally will make cooking at home, outdoor catering and confectionaries easier with good quality products. Also time and energy will be conserved for other useful purpose.
Although advance in technology is rendering some people unemployed, but its somehow not so bad considering time factor. People in the business of chin-chin production complaining of how slow it takes their employees to level the raw chin chin and cut it to shape before frying it. Here is your solution, the chin-chin cutting machine, this machine is in two section, the first section saves you the time of levelling the raw chin chin and the second section cuts both horizontally and vertically giving you the perfect shape depending on the adjustment given to the cutting blade.

1.2 AIM OF THE PROJECT
The aim of this research is to develop a rotary cutter for cutting fresh/ wet vegetables, confectionary and fruits for small scale food processing.

1.3 OBJECTIVE OF THE PROJECT
The project research objectives are:
i. To construct a local fabricated chin-chin cutting machine using available local technology.
ii. To construct a machine with a size specification.
iii. To construct a machine which can perform a domestic operations.
iv. To construct a machine which has adequate capacity, lighter in weight, lesser fatigue and portable.

1.4 PURPOSE OF THE PROJECT
This project is meant to achieve the following purpose
1) To design and fabricate chin-chin cutting machine which easy to operate with high degree of efficiency
2) To design and fabricate a machine (chin-chin cutting machine) that would save time and cost, with high degree of production volume.
3) To design and construct a chin-chin cutting machine that would not have much breaking effect of chin chin during the process.
4) To design and construct a chin-chin cutting machine that is economical and have little or no complication in maintenance
5) To design and construct a chin-chin cutting machine with high percentage at local technology
6) To design and construct a machine that is cost effective and manual stress reduction
7) To have a neat, well-shaped and fast means of producing chin-chin

1.5 JUSTIFICATION OF THE PROJECT
i. This is to promote indigenous machine and their producers.
ii. To have a portable chin-chin cutting machine constructed for domestic uses with a powered driven source.
iii. To improve the economic and the country as a whole by neglecting imported chin-chin cutting machine.

1.6 APPLICATION OF THE PROJECT
This machine is used in homes, restaurants, outdoor catering services and snacks centers. This machine is used for cutting:
i. vegetables,
ii. fruits
iii. confectionaries like chin-chin
iv. and salad ingredients

1.7 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROJECT
-It can cut far more than just chin-chin.
-It doesn’t heat up the chin-chin like other wheat machine can.
-It doesn’t spew chin-chin anywhere.
-This machine saves both cost and time.

1.8 LIMITATION OF THE PROJECT
The limitations of this project are:
i. It cost of production can be higher for students
ii. It’s noisy.
iii. The capacity of the hopper is smaller than other heavy-duty mills. You would need to fill the hopper more frequently than mills with a larger capacity.

1.9 PROJECT ORGANISATION
The work is organized as follows: chapter one discuses the introductory part of the work, chapter two presents the literature review of the study, chapter three describes the methods applied, chapter four discusses the results of the work, chapter five summarizes the research outcomes and the recommendations.