Development of indigenous design and fabrication of manually operated sock knitting machine

Abstract

Currently Africa has a great plan to produce and export textile products to improve regional economy and foreign exchange rate. To carry out this plan cotton cultivation expansion and establishment of textile mills is drastically changing from time to time in Africa especially in Ethiopia. However, the owners of the cotton processing mills are the well-to-do families. This is unachievable for the rest of the people. Importing machineries is beyond the economy of low-income people. Currently, for example the simplest to latest circular sock knitting machine costs from 60 thousand to 1 million Ethiopian birr. In this paper low cost manually operated sock knitting machine was designed and fabricated in Ethiopia. Except needles all parts were designed and fabricated in Ethiopia. The machine can produce one pair of socks in twenty minutes. The machine costs about 22,000 Ethiopian birr. A machine can return on its investment within five to eight months. Socks are some of the largely consumable textile products that many people can invest on it. The local people can easily use cotton yarn to process it. It is therefore, very useful to invest on the newly developed machine. This is the right investment for lower economy people.