Home Made Roller Mill Finally Gets A Gig

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sosman

beerling
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Well some of you probably already know I have been working on a roller mill for ages.

In recent times the motivation levels have risen (due to diminishing beer supply) and I finally got around to brewing on the weekend.

MillAndBatch.jpg


The full story of the construction is at:

RollerMill

The brew I made this weekend hit 90% efficiency - a total surprise to me. Story on the brew (my second all grain) is at:

Allgrain #2

Also if you have bandwidth to burn there is a 1 minute video showing the mill in action at (~4MB):

roller mill home video
 
Nice work on the roller mill

May I suggest an improvement - i friend of mine in Canberra made his own out of redgum
As the rollers are not Knurled - i suggested he use some cloth backed sand paper wraped/glued on the driving roller.

As a wood turning - i gave him some 80 grit cloth backed.
We cut it at an angle and wraped it around the roller.
Works much better.

Since then he has added some cogs so that both rollers are driven.

Very nice.
 
I'm impressed. Looks like you may need to groove the rollers to stop slippage. I set my marga to 1.5mm gap and achieve quite high efficiency, this may also help to stop the slipping.
 
Thanks for the suggestsions guys.

GMK - is that Pete in Canberra?

The slippage isn't unmanageable, there was some stuffing around but even with 0.8mm gap it was crushing at a reasonable rate. If I open it up, as you suggested, it would pull through even better.
 
That is Pete - otherwise known as Bro Nutz...

The one taht makes the Fermentap and the computer controlled stuff and the glycol fermentation chamber etc...

I think he has certainly outpaced Bro Gadget.

BroLogge
 
Sosman,

That mill looks the goods. Nothing like building it yourself. Your woodwork and metalwork teachers would be proud B)
From the video it looks like the hopper is feeding pretty much the entire lenght of the rollers.
If you check out the barley crusher and the valley mills the hopper is angled to feed grain into the middle of the rollers. This makes it less effort on whatever is driving the rollers (drill or crank) and helps direct the output into the bucket.

Food for though ?

Beers,
Doc
 
Top stuff sosman looks like a bit of fine tuning and your milling will be an efficient operation every time. :rolleyes:

Great work on the video production as well! :lol:
 
I think Doc makes a good point. The valley hopper is designed to make use of a surprisingly short length of the available rollers and there must be a reason for that.
 
later ipost some pics big send me of his hoper form his bc as i made it the same it works well
 
Thanks for the tips. I have some pics of BC. Mine does stop an inch or two from the ends.

The hard part is holding everything down with the other hand. Will need to rig up something a little more permanent.
 
Jason - you saw the video, I want to put it to a sound track. Any ideas?

Maybe "heart shaped box"
 
haha reckon it would be a cracker! B) Howz ya singing voice :D

Actually you could whip up one of comb type music boxes as an add on so it could play the tune as you mill the grain :p
 
Now there's an idea. As for the singing voice I will use the "original artist".
 
When I made my"3M" mill, my first hopper covered only 1/3 of the rollers because I was worried about available horsepower (only 65watt). I got bored watching it so I made another which uses 3/4 of the roller. Well, I had to beef a few things up because the contraption went into conniptions but it was worth it as it now mills a kilo per minute. I still need the small hopper if I put a bit of chook wheat thru because that is like crushing gravel.
I set my rollers at one millimetre because I know no better. Does anyone know what the ideal setting is?
 
Tony M said:
I set my rollers at one millimetre because I know no better. Does anyone know what the ideal setting is?
Tony - if you search around you will get a few opinions but I have seen quite a few who set them to 0.9mm. Mine happens to be at 0.8mm because I was screwing around with the adjustment during the grind.

1mm is pretty close to 0.39 inches which is apparently what quite a few people mention.

Why don't you experiment a bit.
 
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