Handloom Mats

Handloom weaving has been identified as a sustainable and remunerative livelihood option for visually challenged people if they are given proper training. a new product, 'handloom mats made from old saris' has been developed by a non-profit organization called 'gramin shramik pratishthan' situated in latur district of maharashtra. the process of making mats from old sarees begins with cutting sarees into small ribbons. this process is very tedious, time consuming and involves a lot of drudgery. there is also safety concern for the visually challenged people during the cutting process. a hand held electric cutting machine is available in the market for this purpose. but the insufficient supply of electricity to many rural areas hampers the productivity of this machine. the objective of our project is to design a machine which will replace the current manual method of cutting old sarees into ribbons. it will reduce the drudgery and ensure regular, timely supply of ribbons wrapped in bobbins for weaving. we have designed three machines to solve this purpose. a) first design is completely human powered with three vertical blade cutters. b) second design has five electric powered rotary cutters. c) third design is completely electric powered with 30 rotary cutters. all these designs have inbuilt saree rolling mechanism. the productivity in terms of number of sarees cut per day is around 120, 175 and 600 respectively. we have conducted some experiments to calculate the forces experienced during cutting of saree bundle and also evaluated the power required in each machine.