“Dotty Sanh” invented automatic onion slicer

A farmer from Hai Duong has brought his automatic onion slicer to put on display at the 2012 Vietnam International Technology and Equipment Trade Fair. The machine is simple, cheap and especially, it can undertake the works of hundreds of workers.

Handfuls of onion and garlic are put into the machine which then absorbs the materials, peels and cuts into equal pieces. It takes just some minutes to slice ten kilos of materials, while onion and garlic would not be crushed or get loss.

 The machine is priced at 4.5 million dong for stainless steel-made frame model and 3.5 million dong for iron-made frame.

 These are the most outstanding features of the automatic slicer invented by Nguyen Van Sanh, a farmer from Nam Sach district of Hai Duong province.

 Nguyen Thu Phuong, a visitor at the trade fair, said she was so surprised when hearing that the machine was invented by a farmer. The machine is small sized, but has high capacity. Especially, the sliced products can preserve their initial quality and freshness because onion and garlic do not get crushed during the slicing process.

 Sanh said Nam Trung commune, where he lives, has been well-known as the onion and garlic growing land. However, the farmers here cannot earn much money from their works, because onion would get rotten soon with no effective preservation method. As a result, farmers have to bargain away in the high harvesting season, or bring onion to urban areas to retail.

In the high season, all members of the families here have to spend the days peeling and slicing onion, then dry them for storage, before the onion gets spoiled. This is a kind of hard work, because people have to sit standstill all the day with eyes having pricking and suffer from the backache.

 Therefore, Sanh decided that he needs to make an automatic slicer which can replace hundreds of workers.

The idea of Sanh was then described as “crazy,” because Sanh, a farmer, who could earn just 20,000 dong a day, had to spend millions of dong at once to buy steel and materials to create the machine. Especially, Sanh just finished the fourth grade and he did not have any knowledge about machine.

 The machine has a simple structure consists of an aluminum tray, an engine, a centrifugal rotation axis, a shaping disc and standard cutter. With a weight of about 30 kilos, the machine can cut the materials accurately as “ordered” by the users.

 Onions, garlic, after cleansing, are poured into the machine. Then they are peeled with a knife above. After that, they went down to the lower part where the other two knives cut them vertically into equal pieces.

 The machine can be used not only to slice onions, but also to pump water, pluck rice off the ears or grind food for livestock. The most outstanding feature of the machine is that Sanh does not use straight-shaped knife, but oval-shaped knife.

 Explaining this, Sanh said straight blades would be able to slice onion only, while it cannot peel onion, or the onion peelings would stick into the blades. Meanwhile, the oval blade would help peel the onion and then discharge the peelings out.

 The machine can peel and slice 60,000-80,000 kilos of onions and garlic an hour. Meanwhile, a worker can peel 15-17 kilos and slice 10 kilos an hour at maximum. As such, the machine can replace hundreds of workers.

VNN

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