Daily Fabrication Thread

[Don P]

I zoomed in on the cornmeals hoping to show the difference in those. There's more fines on the right, more grit on the left but both went through a 16 mesh /inch screen. I've realized when that old man is spreading, feeling and examining product, in this case it is the blend of sizes he is looking at. I'd say left would be good on fish or for breading something but is too lean for bread and right is tolerable but with some tuning is good cornbread meal. Everything is easy till you try it :D.





The roller mills I posted earlier was for flour. Now that you've seen the window screen I'm bolting though...  Each of those roller mills does 2 "breaks", each a little finer. It drops the cracked grain down a chute to the basement where an elevator hoists it up to the 3rd floor and drops it to the bolter on the 2nd floor. So after every 2 breaks, every roller mill's output gets sifted to remove the fine flour and returns the rest to the next finer roller mill in the line and repeats the process of cracking and bolting.

This is the bolter above the stand of roller mills I posted earlier. The orange snake is the drive belt. It is stacks of silk screens of various meshes.Hanging from those bundles of wood rods and shaking enough to shake the whole building.




Here's the eccentric belted drive for that, you can see the canvas flexible chutes connected to the wood chutes to send sifted product down to the correct machine for its next break or finished flour down, up and down to be cooled and sacked. My little bolter on steroids :D

[moodnacreek]

Stahl's logging and sawmill supplies in Pa. had flat belting last i was there.

[Don P]

I mentioned to my wife this morning that I'll need to go to some thresherees once they start up, she just rolled her eyes  :D. I counted gristmills in the 1911 ledger, there were 33 listed in the county at that time, now there are none.

[rusticretreater]

DonP cracked corn and I don't care!  Actually I do.

What you got there Don is a plansifter, not a bolter. How do I know?  I own a mill myself.

A bolter is a long cylinder mounted at an angle and rotated.  It is fed through the top and grain or flour works its way downward, falling through the filtering screen.  The bolter preceded the plansifter in milling.

Here is one of my bolters, circa 1810.


 
Here is my plansifter setup, early 1920's


 
And my Bernard & Lees Roller Milling plants, circa 1920's


 

www.historiczirklemill.org

I guess we should PM.  I don't know many millers.

[thecfarm]

I see a Millers Project 2023 coming up.  ;D

[Don P]

That's a hoot, I thought that was one of my pics of that bolter under the roof. The mill we worked on has one in the same place, it has a 20' Fitz wheel. That is Wolf Bros equipment from 1917.

I recall Ricky Cox calling it a swinging sifter. I like the term plansifter, it is operating in plan. On the label it is a Wolf Gyrator. I have Ricky's book "The Water Powered Mills of Floyd County, Virginia 1770-2010" if you have not read it. There are also some parts to a watermill for sale in Carrol County. 

Do you own the pond, and is the dam and waterway there?

[rusticretreater]

I do not own the area where the dam is. The dam is broken, the mill race is still there but crosses parts of seven different properties.  Its nearly 1/4 mile long due to topography.  Water rights were mentioned in a deed in the mid 1800's.  I have talked to folks and they seem to be aware of its importance.  Nobody has dug it up or filled it in.

Fitz water wheel, 20 1/2 feet dia, 2 feet wide, 54 buckets.

I have seen the book. You should find a copy of  The young mill-wright and miller's guide by Oliver Evans, 1755-1819.  He invented the grain elevator and the hopper-boy and revolutionized milling.  He had his own mill which he constantly modified to run experiments.  He was constantly in court suing to protect his inventions and ended up broke in the end.  

[Don P]

The screen saver on the old computer here is the broken dam of that mill with water pouring through it. It failed in the early 60's and closed the mill. I think it was just using the hammermill in the basement to make feed by that time. That appeared to be the most modern thing there.

I've got Oliver Evans' saved on the computer. For those following along Evans patrons were a who's who of our founding fathers. Looking at your pics I was thinking, its a Evans mill, I don't think I would be lost for too long in there.

Do you think you'll be able to water power it? 
The lake at RJReynolds Jr's estate had an electric generating turbine at the foot of the dam. The gristmill was up above, an electric powered Evans style mill. The shafts in the basement don't care what is turning them. The face of the elevators on the main floor had glass panel sections.

  

[rusticretreater]

Yes the mill was converted to the Oliver Evans design and there is remaining evidence in the mill.  A fella who owned the mill in the 1980's ran water to the mill and it flooded the basement of the general store in town.  The ground is porous with limestone outcroppings everywhere.  He put a liner in the mill race, long gone.  He just badly patched the dam and built a really bad headgate. He got the mill to spin for a demonstration, but no grinding. The mill and the race need a full rehab right now.

George Washington hired the Evans brothers to build his mill at Mount Vernon.  They have a recreated operating Oliver Evans style mill there now.  The only known true Evans mill left is Kline's Mill in Frederick County Virginia.

[aigheadish]

Thanks for talking about this milling stuff guys. I only barely understand what it is but it's fascinating to see and read about. Yet another kind of contraption that I could sit and stare at for hours and hours.

[barbender]

I agree!

[Don P]

And before you know it somebody says "I know where there's one for sale"  :D

[rusticretreater]

Lemme tell ya, that would definitely be spending someone else's money. 8)

[Don P]

Speaking of... Is there any possibility of getting it going again? I know just doing the little stabilizing work we've done, being in a mill in "almost" condition tugs at me very hard, they want to run. The rollers, chutes and elevators require too much work but just to get the old stones turning and hand feed the hopper right there and into the bin... well, you can see where my mind has wandered  :D

[Don P]

My sweet wife found my camera ahead of the rain on the railing, pretty much right where I set it while winnowing that last batch.

This was with the gap in the stones opened up a bit. A good bit of cracked corn and hopefully coarse grits was passing on top of the screen into the cardboard flat but the majority was still making 16 mesh cornmeal or finer


 
The black knob holding the red arm supporting the sifter is adjustable. I've lowered the left side of the sifter just enough to let the meal dance toward the dropoff into the cardboard flat. when grinding properly all the endosperm drops thru the screen and only the bran, the seed coat, passes over the screen. So I guess technically that is scratch on the left and meal in the blue bucket.

I tried winnowing, this was after the first pass, most of the bran blew away, some is at the left end of the flat, mixed with the finer meal. I put that in a bag for a friends yardbirds. Last night I tried toasting that cleaned cracked corn in a dry frying pan over medium head till it browned and got nutty. I covered it with water a few times before bed as it soaked up water. I then cooked it like grits this morning. It is interesting, not bad, definite good starvation food. You're chewing and enjoying a spoonful for the best part of a minute before you can swallow it. Too much of a good thing  :D. Toasting though, there might be something to play with.

Anyway, clean cracked corn on the right and the heaviest bran that didn't blow clear on the left. When you can't screen you can often separate stuff by fanning.


 

Tuesday night I tried the grits I sifted from my fine grinding that first day. They are probably the worst texture/consistency/tooth grits either of us have ever crossed paths with  :D. I cooked and stirred and sampled and added more water and cooked and stirred, an hour passed and they never crossed into or through the eating stage. Sometime about the middle of wrenching the next day it was occurring to me that bran would be excellent oil dry, about 5 minutes later it occurred to my why those grits sucked.

When I ground too fine, I also broke up more bran to a size that would drop through the 16 mesh/inch screen. I made those grits by then sifting through an ~18 mesh screen. In the process I also screened most of the remaining bran into my grits ... my grits were half sawdust  :. Well, oughta be regular for awhile.

The door seal arrived and I'm just back from Lowes. I need to replace at least the lower truck rollup door panel. A sheet of 3/4" form ply $75, $2.35/sf, have mercy.

[Don P]

We've had cornbread multiple ways, johnny cakes (journey cake) and I made grits with that last batch ground the other night, that was the ticket, they were very good.

I was kicking around sticking a pto powered on board generator under the box on the truck. I would need at least 10kw and that is getting out of underhood size. I was casually looking at what it would take when a pto for that transmission popped up on ebay at a good price with minutes to go. Yeah, they saw me coming, I won the bid. I was mowing this morning and the mail lady pulled over and handed me a box. So kind of on a whim, there's a pto under the gristmill truck


 


There it is dangling on the right side of the "other" Muncie 4 speed  :D. Forget racing, this is the SM465 rockcrusher. Granny 1st, its a low and slow indestructable transmission, this looks to be a rebuilt  :D. It can take ptos left and right down there.  I learned to drive on the one in Dad's 1 ton Chevy truck. That's the shaft parking brake at this end.

 

It works, only took a dozen trips with a squeeze bottle to refill the tranny. It is not loud but it is not quiet. There were no shims but a thick metal plate gasket. Is it too thick? I've also never heard a "quiet" one but that might be the company I keep  :D.

Uhh, and I did not mean to kill this thread, it is one of my favorites, y'all take it back!

[Big_eddy]

My simple fabrication project for the day.
Piece of 1/2" plate, and one of 3/8" plate
A couple of press in wheel studs
A drop of 3x4" tubing.


 
A few holes drilled and some welding, then paint.


 
Bolted on


 
In use.




I drilled the top stud for an R pin.  Just in case.

[Crusarius]

That looks nice. many times I have made a spare tire mount out of existing parts so I would have spares with me in case anything went wrong. but that is better than no spare or throwing it in the truck.

[BilgeRat]

Most recent project cable drive log lifter off the side of the splitter, definitely makes dealing with large rounds less painful. 


 

[Firewoodjoe]

 Well she got tired again and laid down. I gave her a 20 minute nap and rolled her back to life. Hills and a light machine dont mix. Well and a full send operator 😂 
Dang wrong thread. Anyway to move it to the carnage thread? 

[barbender]

A rubber tire buncher taking a nap is by no means carnage. That's just standard operating procedure, isn't it?

[Firewoodjoe]

Pretty much. Biggish but very tall oak. Hill side. I was backing down and turning in the bottom of a small valley. This head is terrible for dumping a tree. It will get caught in the top and bottom. Won't come out. You just grab on and enjoy the ride. It don't hurt anything. Smokes a little after lol 

[Don P]

I've been plugging away on the gristmill truck trying to get it ready for a state inspection. I ground and bagged about 125 lbs over the weekend I'll take to the county fair which is exempt face to face sales. I'll be grinding there probaly minutes at a time but didn't want to be forced to bag or have someone wait. All of that is in the garden fridge.

This is the truck as it is now. There is a table/belt guard 8' long behind the mill that is very handy. I still need to work on the vertical part of the guard but i never bumped the belt while it was running and I was sorting or working at the table. There is a handwash sink behind the driver up there on the left.  I need to find a lightweight wall mount fan and get it off the counter. (although it worked great there for winnowing grits and while I was sorting the grain )



 

I'm trying to sort of walk through what will be my HACCP plan, my food prep and safety "script" for them. So this is a pic of me sorting prior to loading the hopper on top of the grinder and also showing the PPE I'd have on there. Holler if you need a beard net, I own the small 300 pack :. Gloves, hat, dust mask, beard net. Need to pick up a towel rack and put it on the side of the handwash sink. That's the drive belt under the table so I need a vertical probably 1/4" ply, wall.

My people don't glow, the bigger sanitation problem with me in non breathing gloves is the sweat was rolling. I'd have to ditch the pair before they sprung a leak or dripped, wash/dry/reglove. I went thru all my gloves. I guess it was my undress rehearsal. I'll swing by the bank and get a couple of new hats before the fair.


 

This is the handwash station. That valve... i can probably stick a plug in it somewhere to reduce the flow, it works but too much flow. 100 degree plus water in VA at a handwash sink. No problem today, the water heater was working just fine.



 

I sifted 50 lbs of the meal in a colander and got five 1.5 lb bags of grits, 70 equal sized bags of cornmeal, 2.5 lbs for us when I opened it up to clean it out. I always overfill a few tenths, never be under, so that was a pound or two. The rest was bran, spilled, initial dial in and purge to clean the stones or unground kernels, all that went into a box for Becky's chickens. Good yield IMO, ~90%. What sells, great, if I'm sitting on a fridge full, the food pantry has never cooled off this year I imagine they can move it while its fresh.



 

It poured for awhile this afternoon while I was grinding, which did cool it down, outside. For awhile I was propping the door open low, and finally had to stop and close it for a while. When I started back up the RH was 100%, it had cooled and was foggy. The fresh ground dry meal was looking for emc just like wood, well, its starch, halfway there. Cleanup was/ is gonna still be a bear, the dampish fines stuck to everything. I blew. vacced, wiped. hopefully the sun will cook the box and dry it tomorrow and I'll blow it again. Interesting stuff, in a cussed way  :D

And the sweetest part of the deal, 150 lbs of grain , on the tommy lift  ;D. A 30lb can holds 2 50 lb sacks. I'll see if they allow it, the Rubbermade Brute cans are listed for bulk storage in restaurant supply catalogs... they just didn't hve any at walmart when I went looking for something rodentproof, And I like metal for that.

[chep]

Dang to far you are so far away. We have a nice patch of Abenaki flint corn that's gonna need grinding this fall. Very cool project @Don P 

[Don P]

On the way to Rob's patch in CA, mobile milling, what could go wrong  :D