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.
