my first workweek

I know this post is coming a bit late, but its all good :)

Friday the 30th of September concluded my first week of work! It just flew by; I seem to have no sense of time here. During the week I continued work and completed the book on the Ghana School Bag Training Initiative.

I also helped Akrofi and Mr. Morrison in the Design Center to create a mechanism for marking patterns for the Kindle cover. Our main goal has been to streamline the production process of the bags by creating systems and methods of producing several bags at a time. The pattern marking mechanism is fairly simple; after all, we must work within the constraints of the tools and materials readily available to us. We are in Africa, after all. We began by making a tray for a pile of the already cut pieces to rest inside. The template with the marking pattern is another piece that fits perfectly into the tray and is used as a stencil. The template will be on a hinge so it can be easily lifted and put in place as the operator has to move the already marked material. Our only problem was how to account for the diminishing height of the pile. The hinged template would have to be attached in a way that allowed it to rise and fall according to the height of the material pile in the tray. I was able to create a design that used a slot for the template to slide through, allowing it to move up and down. I understand this is a little hard to visualize, so I will post a photo of my sketches:

We made a model of the mechanism to make sure it worked, and put in a request for the materials with our carpenter. Right now we are waiting to construct it- Amazon has just released a new version of the Kindle that has smaller dimensions than the old one. That means we will have to redesign the Kindle cover to account for the new dimensions. We will wait to build the mechanism until the new pattern is resolved.

That's the short version of what I worked on this week. Next up: the weekend!