Wooden apple grinding wheel prototype with stainless steel screws as teethThe grinding wheel probably needs more teeth. If it works well enough, I will make one out of hardwood or ask my mate to make me one out of stainless.
Wooden apple grinding wheel prototype with stainless steel screws as teethThe grinding wheel probably needs more teeth. If it works well enough, I will make one out of hardwood or ask my mate to make me one out of stainless.
I built the chute, frame and handcrank. The chute was assembled with just butt joints. But I reinforced it with 22 dowels in total. The frame on the other hand has dadoes. The first chiselled dado was too wide, so I had to glue it with foaming wood glue to fill the void. The other three fits were super tight, I had to use a clamp to force them in.
It was probably very stupid to glue the crank to the axle. Cleaning the wheel will be much more awkward with a handle attached to it. A bolt and nut would have been a better choice I think. But of course I noticed that only after glueling a dowel through the axle to lock it in place. The handle is a section of my grandma's old lamp stand. It's slightly conical and I used the end with the largest diameter to comfortably fit in the hand. It had already a hole in the middle of the cable. I just had to ream it a little bit with a 15 mm drillbit, so I could fit a round M12 coupling nut as a smooth turning surface. In fact I just cut one coupling nut in half for both ends. It now has the perfect slack, both axially and radially. I was quite surprised, it worked better than expected.
Handcrank on the apple grinding wheelGotta drill, saw and glue the wheel axle clamps tomorrow. And a slat has to be glued to the chute to stop it from falling through the frame. And then it can be tested.
After closer examination I figured the cupped frame side rails narrow in the middle. I should have planed them straight to begin with. Grrr. The dadoes might have turned out a tiny bit deeper than planned, too. This combination is evil. Didn't see that coming. Not at all. These two reasons explain some of the tight tolerances, but I reckon there must be something else. Probably a bad calculation. Not sure anymore whether the dry-assembly was with dadoes on both sides or just one side piece. And I also just used the light clamps to hold it together. When glueing I used my more sturdy ones. So I reckon I compressed the width much more.
I gotta sand the inner sides of the frame down by 1-2 mm tomorrow. I hope I can get my sander in. Apart from the hand drill and drill press (unfortunately, I don't have a cool brace and bit) the sander would be the first power tool in this build.
Btw. he is also the one why I started woodworking in the first place about a decade ago. I watched his fascinating videos and read his articles for some years and then thought, I wanna finally do this bloody cool shit, too! Not just watching and thinking about doing it, but actually getting my hands dirty for real. Obviously, I'm nowhere near him, but it's very great fun for sure.