Building a Thresher from a Fanning Mill.

For the inner drum what do you folks think about an LP tank.
I have a 30 pound one that is all rusty and the valve is already out of it.

A plus side is it would be good metal to weld rods to.
A steel shaft that fits the valve hole would work for spinning it as long as I center a matching hole on the bottom of the tank.
If bearings are too expensive for a shaft that size I could either turn it down on the ends for smaller standard bearings or just pour Babbitt bearings for that shaft. The plus side for the Babbitt bearings is installing shims to remove if I use it enough to wear the bearings.
My Rustaholic name should give you a hint that I have Babbitt laying around for my antique hit-n-miss engines anyway.
Note: I do not care what is inside that tank as the grains and straw will only touch the outside of it. It has been laying around for at least ten years with no valve in it.
I still would add water before I started welding rods to it.

Just a thought: have you ever insulated a house with blown-in insulation? It was interesting that those tightly packed chunks of paper in the compressed bags ended up so fluffy when they went inside the walls. The secret was the high speed fan turbine which sucked them out of the hopper and sent them thru the ridged hose at a super high velocity--by the time they exited the hose, they had been stirred and dashed against the hose ridges that they were fluffy. Could you use the same concept here?

Instead of having mechanical, revolving beater bars and concaves--why not do it the other way around??? Use high speed wind to suck/push the grain through the system and dash it into stationary bars--and let the air do the rest?

Sure would like somebody with a welder try it out......I think a whole concept of affordable homestead threshing systems could start with that. From field to bin....

geo

You can still use wood in you design, for the box, and drum ends.
You can use sheet to line the box, and metal for your working parts.

my thoughts are 3/4 ply for the wood, flat stock for your bars, rather then staples as in the vid I posted, bolts through the flat stock, to minimize the bolts wire across them.

After you you drill your bolt holes and a hole on both ends for attaching to the sides of the drum, put a 90 bend on the ends.

attach your flats to the drum sides. bolt it not screws.

Put in the bolts for the beater bars, wrap on the wire around the bolts the length or the bar. maybe a couple rows depending on the length of the bolts

for the shaft a piece of all thread, lock nut both sides of the ends and use a bushing to fit a pillow block, mount the pillow blocks out side of the box, then use a shaft adapter to fit a v belt sheave and use a low rpm motor to turn it. Or gear down a high rpm.

If you can get your hands on a squirrel cage you could also blow out some of the trash as your threshing. blowing down toward the exit shoot and a boxed chute on top.

what I'm thinking of for the box is a curved bottom, just enough clearance for the drum, but done like a trough so the grain gets agitated and beat a bit to remove the more chaff . and the shoot located a bit above, as you get more grain in it eventually gets knocked out.

If you incorporate a bit of a drop on the exit you could have another fan to winnow you gleaning as it falls.

I wish I could make it clearer I can see it but feel I'm having trouble explaining it...

Why not have the grain/trash pass over a chute that is filled with tiny holes only big enough for the seed to pass through.This would be of a swinging forward and back in rocking motion thing. The seed would hit another solid trough immeadeatly below it, and the trash would go all the way to the end of the trough to drop past where the grain was caught. Its action could be made by having a pulley on the crank end, or cyl shaft, and another on the shaft holding one end of the trough. A arm from the trough could come up and be bolted to one end of that pulley to make the reciprocating motion.

Excessive speed, I think is the most important thing. Plenty of speed will knock the heads out of the grain in quick time avoiding the idea of having to hold the sheaf for a 1/2 min or more.

Sounds like some good ideas.
I am having trouble getting my head around some of these ideas though.
I have a lot of squirrel cage blowers around here from 4" to 30".
One of the 12 or 16 inch ones would probably work.
I really want this to work with only one power source though.
With me it is more likely to be an engine rather than an electric motor.

Seems like that would have me making several different size screens for different grains. I believe I am away from holding the straw and leaning more towards throwing it all in there.
Yes the drum will be turning fast. The idea for a blower pushing it all through sounds a lot faster than just sloping it so the grain will drop one way. Actually that 30" blower might be just what it would need. My sweet wife might have to find some other heavy thing to hook the dog's rope to.

I really like your ideas if I understand you right.
Yes the clearance between the drums must be adjustable.
Wood is out though. I want it all metal.
I just need to see what I have for a tank that is larger than an LPG tank.
If I need an inner drum longer than the flat area in the center of that 30 pound tank I have an old decommissioned 100 pound LPG tank also.

Please be aware folks this whole thing needs to stay within the size of an upright piano. That 30 inch blower might be pushing the limits but this whole thing whatever it ends up being like will be wagon mounted so it is portable.

Have you tried to access drawings of early 1860s threshing machines for ideas?

The last two weeks I have felt like a one arm paper hanger.
I need to get out of here in a few minutes.
If you could find me a link to some of those pictures of the old guts of them that would be great.

Yesterday at work I was running this by an older man and what that jogged in me was to use the 100 pound LPG cylinder and have it turn inside a water heater cylinder.
Make a hopper to feed it from above and have that 30" blower blowing from the left side. On the right end something like was mentioned above with the out-feed tube with holes for the grain to drop out.
This part is still fuzzy in the plan.

Sorry I don't know how to do that. I have a few bookls that show earl;y exploded pics of hand threshers, and early belt powered threshers, but I cant do anything with them anyhow.

Please do tell me where you got them.
It would be so great to have them here.
If you can locate them and give me the exact title I can probably find them.
Why reinvent the wheel when that info is out there.

Google is your friend.
Look what I found.
It seems my 30 inch blower would be too big.


The plans can be down loaded here.
http://www.slideshare.net/seedtray/a...r-smallholders

Here is a video of him growing wheat and using his thresher.
Now are we back to just beating the grains off the ends of the straw and not feeding it all through the thresher?

No. I really want to find the old ones info.
It would be so much easier to thresh out a 1/6th acre of buckwheat if I can just throw it all through.
If you follow that back to YouTube you will find his part two and that shows more about how he drys the wheat.
As I have been told here my buckwheat and oats should be easier to thresh.

Look at the book, Farm inventions in the making of America.

I see the guy above used my screen idea. Seems like you could make one screen and the bottom of it be for the largest seed you would deal with. Then make progressively smaller screens to just lay on top the big main one for smaller seed.

Thank you, I just bought one.

I really hope when it gets here this book will show me views of a grain binder too.
If not then that will be my next grain build anyway.
My sickle bar mower will cut the crop then as it falls what am thinking right now it could drop on a belt made from old parts snowmobile tracks.

I have two that are just alike so they shouldn't be hard to link them together.
If it is too much to build a grain binder then a grain loader could pick it up onto a wagon to be put to dry in the loft of the hog/goat barn I am going to build.

You are talking of a reaper, not a binder.. Get a piece of 4 X 8 tin and wire it to the sickle at 4 places. Make a rake with teeth around 6in high, and at least 2ft wide.

As I wrote. I would love to build a binder.
IF that is not possible or practical then yes I will go with what you call a reaper.
That is a good and proper name for it.
Since the sickle bar mower on my AC B-210 is four feet long I would center my snowmobile tracks on the bar and use sheet metal to make wings to collect the harvest both ways. The wings will have sides and slope to bring the cut crop to the belt. I would just have to stop and tie the grains often.
Yes a binder would be a lot better.
We have a guy in our club that has one of the antique grain binders and they use it every year to bind wheat or oats to run through the old threshing machines during the show. I do not believe he would give it to me.

Probably wouldn't sell it for a fair price either lol

Look up TILLERS Harmee grain reaper