I had to wait until payday to pick up the ingredients for tomorrow's brew day. So I went down after work to the LHBS, but was informed that they couldn't crush them Friday, nor could they promise them for Saturday, maybe Sunday, they would call.
Unacceptable to say the least. (Did I mention I was the only one in the store, they had an hour until closing time, and her excuse was she couldn't do it and wait on customers at the same time, oh, and it took me all of 5 minutes to crush the grain once I finished this set-up. Nice customer service there CMC.)
So I bought a hand crank grain mill. This moved up one of the projects I was planning for 2013 to tonight. I assembled the mill, which is kinda of aggravating in it's design as the edge clamp puts the mill outlet over whatever flat surface you have it clamped onto. This is fine for small hobby type stuff, but for milling 10 lbs of grain it isn't feasible.
I fortunately have this small portable table we received for free from the furniture store when we bought our new dining room set. It had been floating around, not really finding a place in the house and ended up on the patio outside.
I took that table and cut a hole in the top in order to insert a funnel to catch the milled grain. The funnel drops it into a chute that empties into a bucket.
I removed the hand crank from the mill and inserted the proper sized tap from my tap and die set (you lose man points if you don't know what that is), put a socket in my power drill to match, and Viola! Electricly Powered Grain Mill.
Start to finish, about 1 1/2 hours.
Right now I'm just using scrap cardboard for the funnel and chute, some time in the future I'll come up with a better solution, but it works for now.
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| Mt Dew box forms the funnel through the table, dropping into the cardboard slide to the bucket. |
The crush looks pretty good to me, I have no whole grains that are uncrushed and plenty of hulls to set the grain bed. Looking forward to tomorrow.
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