Saturday Night.

Well, I am rested up after a good night's sleep.

Check out my new corn burning equipment. This old bit of hardware came from my father's farm, by way of my brother in law's chicken shed for the past twenty years. It is a fanning mill, and is used to clean grain.

I am guessing the machine must be about 80 years old. It was pretty much ancient, back when I was a kid, helping my dad clean seed oats. The last twenty years in the chicken coop didn't help it much but at least it was mostly dry in there. There was a layer of chicken dung on it when we first brought it out of the shed but sitting in the back of the truck for the the two hundred mile trip home in the rain the other night pretty well cured that problem. It still has a rather disticnt odor, but it is visually fairly clean. The hopper is pretty much rotted out, but it shouldn't be too hard to rebuild. The fan seems in pretty good condition, though it does have one spot where it rubs against the housing. I will have to re-form that a little bit. I am also going to have to put my hands on one belt leather. Not sure how tough that is going to be. I will also try to build some sort of vacume attachment to the top where the fan blows out. I will be using this inside my basement so I am going to try to make it as dust free as possible.

Here is a shot looking down from above. You can see the bottom of the two screens. The top screen seems to be missing entirely. The bottom screen is rotted out and hanging off at an angle. No mind. These are the oat screens. The screens we used in the mill to clean oats for planting in the field. I need to put in the corser screens to clean corn. The way this mill works is the first screen takes out the big stuff. The corn falls through it. The stalks, cobs and such ride on the top of the screen and fall in the chute. The second screen takes out the fines. The corn rides on the top of the second screen and the fines fall through. The the corn passes and drops in front of the fan which takes out the chaff and bee's wings. I think I will need to buy a new top screen and build a frame for it. I think the corn bottom screen I have.

You can see in this, a shot of the hopper I am going to have to build. Should be a pretty easy project. Not sure if I will build it out of pine, I have some pretty nice looking maple down in the shop. That would make a sturdy little hopper. With the price of clear pine these days, maple isn't very much more expensive. You can also see in this shot, the spare screens down in the bottom. I think there are six spares, mostly really fine ones. I think back at the time my Dad said they were for cleaning alphalfa seed. I am looking forward to getting this machine into production by next season.


Traeger burn pots. The weakest link in the chain.

Here is my season and a half burn pot. I have already had this pot welded twice. I has cracked again. The stainless steel on the top part of the pot is getting very thin. The air holes you can see on this pot are actually getting quite sharp on the edges.

Check out the comments on this post of my blog
March 15th. The comments by teajohn are quite interesting. Now I don't know if this guy's real last name is Traeger, or just what. He sure thinks Traeger is on the right track. It sure seems like I hear the bottom-feed-burn-pot folks complaining less than what I complain.



I don't have time to weld this burn pot right now. Not even sure if my neighbor the welder is in town. I need a short term fix. Enter boiler cement. With boiler cement, you can patch a burn pot hole. It doesn't last long, maybe two burn pot changes, so eight to ten days of burn time. I have thought some of wadding in some pink fiberglass insultation with the boiler cement to get to have a little more body, and bridge gaps a little better. I haven't done this yet though. I will give a report if I try it.

This boiler cement I bought at the local True Value Hardware store. I think it was about four bucks for this container. It goes a very long ways. I have patched burn pot holes three times this season and it doesn't even have a quarter of an inch taken out of the container.