Small Scale Grain Threshing Machine

Seeing as you have to double handle each stem anyway, would it not work to trim the heads off each stem and let it drop into a bucket, rather than line them up, and then have a hopper you tip all the heads into so they feed into the thresher by themselves? That should work for oats then too as you handle it once above a bucket and then whatever drops off goes through the hopper.

Have you tried other grains besides wheat & oats?
Are you making custom orders or selling the plans?

👍💛

Very nice! I have seen a miniature version of this concept to clean other seeds for the garden.

Wondering how much the final cost of the grain is, factoring in the amount of time dedicated to planting, harvesting, processing, etc. (To figure time cost, the way I do it is to consider what I'd be doing instead. For instance, if I can manage $5 worth of beans in an hour [roughly 5 lbs] or get a pound of grain instead, that's $5/lb of grain.)

Excellent invention, thank you for sharing!

I bet that chaff is a fantastic fire starter

I understand the concept of "a higher PERCENTAGE of our own food". It is impossible for a house-lot owner to grow all their own food, much less an apartment dweller. I think that the great advantage in DIY for growing/cooking/preserving is the satisfaction and knowledge.
That said, "Management Measures", and if we're not measuring, then we are not managing. Might you post some idea of rates here? Suppose I bake all my own bread and go through 2.5 Kg of bread flour/whole wheat flour every three weeks. How many Kg of wheat grain will I need (should be about 2.5 Kg!), and how many of YOUR acres would you need to produce grain at the rate of 2.5Kg/3 weeks (or about 50Kg of grain per year)? Thanks, Chris

Ummmm. I like to say that "Everybody needs a hobby." I have a number of hobbies that aren't particularly economic but which I do because I enjoy doing them. An example would be collecting rainwater to be independent of citiwater.

I also have collected oak acorns, cracked and washed, dried and ground them into flour. Worth doing in the event of a famine, but otherwise nnot worth repeating.

I'd classify this effort to be independent of flour manufacturers in the same category. Growing and processing grain has been massively mechanized, and the results are very cheap flour. Home growing grain and processing it into flour can duplicate that by investing huge amounts of labor into doing it. Just not worth the effort in my view.

Growing a vegetable garden or fruit trees has a much bigger payoff, I suggest.

But again, if this hobby appeals to you, help yourself.

So you get clean wheat kernals, fine chaff and straw. Food, compost, mulch, bedding and even thatch. I like this apparatus.

If you fed the grains through again after all done without the beater on, would that refine it even further?

Maybe the oats are better to be threshed by hand, into a tote or bucket, and then you can pour them through for the winnowing. Or maybe a second blower blowing a small current of air into the thresher, it could keep the oats in place long enough to dehull them

Nice! Imagine that machine doing acres per day? I like to eat cheap. Your state university extension folks likely can connect you with real plans and engineering. Stay safe.

Would a tumbler help separate the hull from the oats after you run it through the machine?

I sometime grow wheat to stop soil wind erosion on my farm. I would grow more but wheat is not profitable because of low grain prices and higher labor cost. I have to pay $50 per hr for a truck driver to help me haul it from the field. How long did it take you to grow & harvest a few cents worth of wheat? Come help me because I thresh 50,000 lbs of wheat per hr.

Super cool gadget! I'm not far enough into my homesteading journey to need this yet, but I have absorbed the information and will hopefully find myself needing one of these soon. (Soil amending is no joke, man. It's taking seemingly forever.)

You need an adjustable clearance friction roller to role the grain against a backstop so the chap comes off.

Good thing you don’t need to grow the corn to make the fuel to power this thing, otherwise it would take 1000 lbs of corn to get a gallon of wheat this way.

Seems like a huge waste of time building that. Lots of work for almost no gain

I always ask myself why people still use the techniques that were common back then - on the one hand, cutting the wheat and on the other hand, knocking out the wheat grains.
People don't seem to even think of another technique than if they just continue to practice what they know - because it's so - convenient (??)?
If you plant parsley, you only harvest the heads at the top because the stalks are not considered digestible! You throw away the valuables and only harvest the leaves!
how stupid is that...?
Try it: take a parsley stalk and chew first on the leaf and then on the stalk!
what do you notice?
Suddenly it tastes like parsley - and it tastes salty!
Why?
Because the fiber stems of every plant - store minerals, trace elements and also vitamins in the stem structure - i.e. what is initially liquid - causes it to crystallize, to crystallize out!
Since they are crystals, little plant tissue is required to hold the growing, heavier crowns and heads of the parsley - and still be and remain flexible because crystals are not firmly connected to each other.
in simple words!
So you can actually not eat parsley stalks - as they are grown in nature - but chop them up in a blender!
Do this: put the entire plant with stem and all the trimmings into the blender and then chop it up!
then taste it - pure is good.
You can eat it and it can also be digested in the human digestive system - very well!

Let's get to the wheat: when it's warm, you cut the grain off at the bottom - across the ground - why not use a kind of comb - and only tear off the wheat stalks from the bottom to the top in the usable parts?
then all you need is a vibrating screen in a small machine!

Of course you can separate the wheat grain from the husks: why not: it does work, but it creates work - pointless work!
Since you have to grind the wheat grain anyway - why don't you harvest the wheat grain better - with the aforementioned comb, from bottom to top - and dry what is torn off?

Today, wheat grain is ventilated so that it doesn't mold or rot. But nobody knows the best thing - that the entire construct of the wheat head can be ground together and therefore completely digestible. The husks and stalks stay with me!
The advantage: the straws also contain minerals, trace elements, vitamins - which remain even after drying, so they are preserved!
You don't need a monster-sized threshing machine - you can do it with a small tractor.
Only you harvest the whole grain at the top and not just the wheat grain in the middle.
The problem with storage is compaction - wheat grain is due to wheat grain: this is wrong today and causes high expenses and costs!

Sorry: I think your machine is a nice hobby - but it's not really practical! So it doesn't correspond to my intention - to save work through efficient procedures and technology - and the effort to simply be lazy - rather than create a lot of useless work.
Kind regards from Berlin, Germany

Ingenious! What is the roller drum made from?

Just thinking for the oats. if the beater had to beat the oats through a bristle head like a broom head maybe it would remove the husk. Might help break up some of the wheat reeds too.

I never thought I would love something like this! Great job, now I'll be building one

You could make a second stage to put the chaff through the same process again thus removing seeds that went into the original chaff route and missed the first seed bin

I bet you could use parts from an old drill press to upgrade this. They already have a variable speed belt driven pulley system with control, capacitor, and an on/off button and switch. You could probably just take the top case and motor off a drill press as is and fit it to this thresher.

That works really well, i expected to see a bit of chaff in the grain or vice versa but that all looks very clean.

the belt needs a cover otherwise perfect

A bit more complicated than a stick and wind but creative.

Awesome video mate.. do you have plans to build this machine you could share with us? Cheers

On a windy day, take your wheat and pour it from bucket to bucket a few times. The wind will blow the husks away and the wheat will land in the bucket.

your screen needs to keep the oat /chaf combination in the thresher until it's broken down, either a smaller screen or maybe more teeth on the spinning wheel.

I had paper shredders and metal shredders in heavy industry. Most classifying equipment is also run with air currents, however in order to classify things correctly they must have the weigh difference as you have discovered.

Nice one 👍 have you ALLSO got a mill it would be great to see the whole process from garden to the oven but anyway thanks for the video

Outstanding

Do you have plans so I could make one

I feel like your energy would be better utilized by hand threshing, then pouring the chaff and grain into the winnowing box.

I bet that chaff makes for some great chicken bedding

I appreciate your video and machine, it's great work.
Your audio is peaking throughout the video however, and it's a bit painful to listen to. This is an older video, maybe you fixed the issue.

Well done. Excellent. Thanks for sharing

No build video?

I’m not handy. But if I can buy the blueprint from this. I’d find someone to build it for me!!

I saw your lentil short vid and wanted to see more about the machine. Great idea/design and implementation!

My thoughts on the design:

Having to catch the grain in a closed bin is a pain. Maybe if you just aimed the blower up the grain chute you wouldn't need to seal the grain bin?
Someone else suggested a vacuum to suck the chaff away. That's a great idea, but I think you'd need something like a leaf-blower/sucker to avoid having to redesign the system. Otherwise you'd need to make a filter to protect the blower, and you'll have to empty the chaff from it every so often.

To get around the straw problem, could you have a larger exit from the beater drum? Direct the output over a longer grid that is flat, but has an open outflow for the straw to go through. So the grain and chaff fall down, but the straw goes through and out. If may need some airflow to keep the straw from jamming the outflow though. Possibly a design that need several iterations, unfortunately.

What a way to also produce premium straw for thatching too😍

Get a 6'foldable table and put it against a wall. Get a bunch of the stems and push the seeds against the wall. Grab the bunch and your wheat is ready to thresh.

It's an interesting first build! good stuff.

If it works like a combin which i think it does for the oats you need a thiner screen and mabey some more wind

Might be easier to get an old grain cleaner and do the proper cleaning to then. Very impressive

bear the wheat outta em😂

maybe add a shield on the pully
entanglement hatard and all that

Cool

I have had great success harvesting oats with a blueberry rake. I simply walk through the oats and rake the berries off the top of a standing crop and drop the grain into a garbage barrel. I can fill a barrel in about 20 minutes. I have used it as chicken feed and didn’t remove the chaff but I’m sure it could be beaten and blown in a similar fashion as your invention.

Love to see it!! Nice work

Different size screen under the drum for legumes. Can you do something small like amaranth in this ?