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I picked up my first 25 kilo sack of barley yesterday...let the fun begin:



Need something to crush it with tho....Luckily I recieved my Crankandstein barley crusher a couple days ago:




It's a bare bones unit for which you have the option to make your own base and hopper instead of buying one.
Seen several styles from the good ol' internet and went from there.

I decided to go with angle iron and plexiglass for the hopper set-up.

Ok...first thing was to box off the sides of the crusher. I used aluminum flashing I had kicking around:

Easy stuff to work with and cut. I had to cut notches for the mounting bolts and adjustment bolts.
Other than that, this was the simplest of the whole build.

One thing I seen somewhere was a set-up with a water-bottle style hopper that also had a feed gate.
I had some 1/2" thick plexi-glass about so I got to thinking I could use this for making a feed gate set-up of my own.
I basically sandwiched two identical pieces together. One of the pieces I routered out for the gate to slide into.


Here's the two pieces side by side( routered piece on left):


Closer shot of routered piece:


Here they are together:


Test fitting onto crusher:


You can see the gap in the two previous pictures where the gate will slide into.

Of course we need the gate as well....:


For the frame I used angle iron. Cut out some pieces to bend to my desired shape and MIG welded solid again:



Took the brackets and mounted to top of crusher/feed gate. If ya look closely you can see the gate, It's about halfway open:


Then it was just a simple matter of cutting the panels for the hopper and mounting them to give me my almost final product:


I want to give it a trial run before painting the angle iron and cutting off the screws.
Now all that remains is to make the base.

Nice build!

Looks great! Nice work. Any idea how many lbs. of grain it'll hold?

jeffsmith wrote:Looks great! Nice work. Any idea how many lbs. of grain it'll hold?

I have no clue....yet. I'll post it whenever I figure it out. I'm hoping 5 pound....

yup, looks fantastic. good work!

Great job!!

Very nice build.

Thanx all.

Well, I finished my base this evening. Used the last remaining piece of a old cupboard door I took down a while ago. All I had to do was cut a hole for the grain to fall down through plus the mounting holes. I also put three small pieces of copper pipe on the underside to keep it positioned on the bucket.





A quick video of a couple handfuls for initial roller cleaning/trial run:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LB7aNxIV ... r_embedded" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;


This is what I end up with in the end:



Did ya notice that my gate piece also doubles as a cleaning tool? Just figured that out when I was getting a little wary of my fingers!

Anyhow, seems like a good crush,...not that I have much experience in this.

I would estimate that hopper to take between 8 to 10 pounds of grain. Too bad though you couldn't tilt that hopper in more so that the grain pours right into the middle of the rollers and you wouldn't have to have the dead space at the bottom requiring you to scrape the graing into the rollers.
Still a good build. Congrats.

I hear ya.....I may put in some extra pieces of plexi-glass to rectify. I do believe there is such a thing as food grade silicon. That would make the modification a lot simpler.

Here she is with 8.5 pounds loaded in it: