The major areas of need in the cane industry are identified along the plant process as cane
preparation, milling, juice extraction, sugar boiling and separation of crystal. Mechanical power
is the most essential need in these areas, except for juice concentration and sugar boiling that
requires heat. The milling of sugarcane is a unit operation that crucial for making sugarcane
juice available for various applications. The currently available sugarcane juice extractors
require high energy and sophisticated mills, driven mechanically. These are out of the reach of
small scale and rural farmers that are presently involved in processing of cane juice into
ethanol, brown sugar and other related products in Nigeria. The development of a small
scale sugarcane juice extractor was therefore to meet the needs of the small scale farmers who
cannot afford the high capacity and complex cane crushers. This successfully project designed
and constructed a simple mechanical device for extraction of sugarcane juice. The functional
performance and economics operations of the machine were evaluated. The output capacities of
10.50, 12.00 and 14.25 kg/ hr were obtained at operating speeds of 0.25, 0.3 and 0.36 m/s. The
extraction efficiency of the machine ranged between 40 and 61 % at operating speeds of 0.25
and 0.36 m/s. It was observed that this optimum performance of the machine cannot be
sustained over a long processing period due to the bluntness development of the perforated
grating drum over time. However, conditions that enhanced in maximum operating
performance were enumerated.