Development of a Manually Operated Guillotine Cutter

A manually operated foot leverage pedal with adjustable blades guillotine cutter was designed and constructed using locally available materials. This machine was designed to shear variety of materials with various thicknesses and sizes depending on the cutting blade capacity and the shearing angle, which cuts the materials with minimal waste and without the formation of chips and bending of the material. The machine is foot powered. It works by first clamping the material with a ram. A moving blade then comes down across a fixed blade to shear the material. The moving blade was inclined at 0.5°, this angle is called the rake angle, to keep the material from becoming wedged between the blades. Test carried out on mild steel shows that the machine is capable of shearing the metal sheet with maximum thickness of 0.5mm