"Lloyd E. Sponenburgh" lloydspinsidemindspring.com wrote in message
. 3.70...
Karl Townsend fired this volley in
:

don't reinvent the wheel. Use a centrifical separator. I have a 7.5
horse vacuum for a shop with this ahead of the motor/vacuum assembly.


Karl, don't you re-invent the wheel.

Richard, instead of cooking up hair-brained ideas about passing full-
sized tree nuts throught the blades of a high-speed centrifugal fan, why
not consider looking up how nut shelling equipment actually works.
Likely, any decent-sized college with an agricultural program should have
some books on the subject. You'll probably find a lot of stuff excerpted
on the web.

It's kind of useless diving into a project, planning to use a vacuum
cleaner to do a job, and not even understanding how a vacuum cleaner
works!

Lloyd

There is a lot of information pecan processing machinery, but most of it
is proprietary, and I have yet to find any with diagrams of the inner
workings. Vacuuming and shelling and cleaning have nothing to do with each
other, and work on entirely different principles. They cost in the $15,000
range for nonmechanical people.

For right now, I have that 2.2hp vac that works just fine for picking them
up. I built a plate in the inside of the drum where the discharge hose
slams the pecans into the plate to knock loose any of the remaining four
part outer husks. What I would like to do is make just a vacuum hose so
that I can take them right from the ground to a hopper, and have the hulls
and dirt fall off them, and end up with clean nuts in the hopper, ready to
be taken to be washed, and cracked, and then take the nut meat out.

I DO understand how a vacuum cleaner works, and even have an idea on how to
make what I want, was just looking for more information, which is what you
suggest that I do. I understand enough about vacuums to know that you can't
run pecans through the vanes of the vacuum generator, thus, I was looking
for a different approach.

And I disagree with you. On many inventions and things that men have built,
they were not told that it couldn't be done, or that it had never been done
before, but merely given the problem, and without the burden of knowing this
was almost futile, their thinking processes were not contaminated, and they
came up with solutions to "unsolvable" problems that "couldn't" be done.

Whether you think you can or can't, you're right. - Henry Ford - who, IIRC,
came up with most of his ideas in his kitchen.

What I want to do is to leave the scene with only the nuts, leaving all the
trash there. Now, if a person wants all that falderal removed for aesthetic
reasons, I'm happy with hauling it all off for a fee, and I have a separator
screen that will take the pecans out in about half a second. I just want to
keep it light, and not handle things any more times than I have to.

My best idea so far is to mount a big shop vac motor on top of a 55 gal
barrel, exhaust up. Put an intake on the side of the barrel. On the
intake, inside the barrel, put a screen that will kick the pecan into a
hopper, while letting the waste pass through and into a refuse pile. It's
going to be a couple of simple hoses, some screening, and the right
arrangements of said components.

I have the cracker and sheller already figured out, just have to build one
and try it until I fine tune it. Pecans must be cracked by compressing the
ends, not by crushing the sides. This is how you remove two halves instead
of getting a lot of small pieces.

I'll get there, and obviously, from your post, you don't have anything to
contribute to my post in the way of ideas ..........

Steve