Developing a wood lathe machine with speed control and workers' anthropometry to increase the productivity of broom industry

Abstract

To overcome the economic crisis in the current situation, the community in the village of Dawan Klungkung-Bali was encouraging small and medium-sized businesses, including the home industry sector, specifically the production of broom handles that made from leftover wood. The production process is quite simple where the worker utilized wooden chisels and hand grinders to create the broom handle. Even though the methods and tools are simple, it takes a long time to complete one broom handle. In addition, the process continued with the sanding process to smoothen the product, which caused the workers to quickly become fatigued due to the long duration of the bending down and pressing gestures. To address this issue, a wood lathe with speed control and height adjustment based on worker anthropometry was developed. This study was volunteered by ten workers that compared the workload of both traditional and proposed method. Workload is determined by measuring the worker's pulse with a pulse meter, skeletal muscle complaints that observed using the Nordic Body Map questionnaire, and worker productivity that calculated by dividing the number of broom handles produced per hour by the workload.