DanielW
Well-known Member
- Location
- Haliburton, Ontario
How do folks. I have a surfeit of oats this year, as I often do, and am cleaning and bagging them to sell to the odd horse person who I also sell hay to. It's a slow way to get rich to be sure, but they might as well get used. I use an old Hance, 'Vac-A-Way' seed cleaner. Very similar to the Clipper 1B's and 2B's and many other old two-stage fanning mills, the only difference being this pulls the lights through the fan and blows them out the side, rather than hitting them with a blast and blowing them out the front (hence the name, 'Vac-A-Way').
This particular batch of oats is exceptionally weedy. Loads of lambsquarters and pigweed seed. The fanning mill does a good job getting them out. But I'm having a problem with the lower (fine) sifting screen: The appropriate lower screen for oats/grain gets plugged with fines, oats on end, seed pods, etc. after about every 15-20 minutes of use. When this happens, the weed seed can't go through it and thus comes out with the clean grain. I can mitigate this to some degree by poking in there and rubbing it over with an old rubber fuel hose and a quick blast of air every 5 minutes or so, but it makes things tedious and still plugs up at least every 30-40 minutes.
For those of you using old fanning mills, have you ever experienced similar problems? If so, have you found any ingenious solutions to rectify? I know more modern vibratory seed cleaners have different methods to keep them clean (balls that bounce around on top, a scalping apron chain to keep it clean, etc.), but I don't think I could retrofit anything like that on here without it being too costly, complicated, and throwing off the weight balance. I've tried various lower screens without much success, and have my air blast on max to try and get out as much as possible before hitting the lower screen (I don't really care about losing a few oats out the air blast or with the fines).
This particular batch of oats is exceptionally weedy. Loads of lambsquarters and pigweed seed. The fanning mill does a good job getting them out. But I'm having a problem with the lower (fine) sifting screen: The appropriate lower screen for oats/grain gets plugged with fines, oats on end, seed pods, etc. after about every 15-20 minutes of use. When this happens, the weed seed can't go through it and thus comes out with the clean grain. I can mitigate this to some degree by poking in there and rubbing it over with an old rubber fuel hose and a quick blast of air every 5 minutes or so, but it makes things tedious and still plugs up at least every 30-40 minutes.
For those of you using old fanning mills, have you ever experienced similar problems? If so, have you found any ingenious solutions to rectify? I know more modern vibratory seed cleaners have different methods to keep them clean (balls that bounce around on top, a scalping apron chain to keep it clean, etc.), but I don't think I could retrofit anything like that on here without it being too costly, complicated, and throwing off the weight balance. I've tried various lower screens without much success, and have my air blast on max to try and get out as much as possible before hitting the lower screen (I don't really care about losing a few oats out the air blast or with the fines).
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