Fruit and vegetable cutter

cults3d

Idea was born on a beautiful Sunday morning while making my favorite breakfast – The fruit salad. This is a mixture of fresh sliced fruits such as apple, kiwi, banana with honey and lemon juice. For sure, it's good energy for the morning. However, I don't like making this salad often because it takes too much time to cut fruit into small pieces. At that point, I started thinking; how to make a tool which will split and cut fruit in one operation. There are many different tools available to slice fruits but they all just split the fruits in one way. Maybe something similar already exists, if so, please let me know. My mechanics work on a very similar machine (mincer) for making sausages or mincemeat. You put pieces of meat into the machine and get tiny pieces of meat (mincemeat). So I created a design which will push fruit through the desired splitter and after that, there's a blade which will cut fruit into small pieces. Also, you can print different shapes of splitters (hexagonal, circular, ...) or different numbers of blades to get different sizes of fruits. I plan to create all parts with printed plastics because I want to see how far we can use printed parts and what forces they withstand. Two weeks ago, I created the first prototype of the whole model (V1). The design looked very nice and all parts seemed to work as they should. But when I tried to slice a piece of apple or banana, problems appeared. As soon as the apple hit the splitter, the table started rotating which prevented it from pushing through the splitter. Second problem was that the table was printed with 10% infill and 2 shells, making it bend and create very big friction which stopped it from rotating. I tried to apply some force but almost broke the main spiral shaft. In the meantime, I was designing V2 of my prototype, which is a lot smaller than its predecessor V1. Thingiverse announced their competition, so I thought my idea was good enough to compete and hoped to finish my design by the end of it. But problems that I wasn't expecting appeared, and redesigning began. The main problem now is that the splitter is not sharp or thin enough to cut apples. In the worst case, I will have to use steel blades or something similar which can easily cut fruits or vegetables. So, I uploaded version V2 of my prototype where all known problems should be fixed. Unfortunately, I didn't have time to print and test it yet, but I hope to get some progress in cutting apples next week. If you like my idea, please support it by clicking the like button. Stay tuned!