2020 - Fanning Mill Improvements
Vložit
- čas přidán 7. 01. 2022
- With harvest done and cover crops planted, our main winter time activity is cleaning, bagging, and selling wildlife feed. We'd only done a small trial the previous winter, selling from February to early April. From that experience we learned a few lessons about how to be efficient, and where the weak points were in our equipment and process.
Way to improve the efficiency of the mill. I'm sure the improvements have more than payed for themselves. Can't wait for the next video.
Awesome!! I really enjoy your videos... reminds me of working with my father...
Looking good guys be safe out there your buddy from Nebraska
That's a great setup now! We only used ours one time per year to clean seed oats, so I still had to shovel in and out of the machine to keep it running.
It's cool to see what you can do with that old machinery
Always tweaking and fiddling around! Gotta keep life interesting, right?
Interesting efficiency improvements. We have a similar fanning mill on our farm up by Duluth and you can see our system in action from this fall on our YT site. We clean and bag oats for seed in a more labor intensive manner but I may ‘borrow’ some of your ideas.
BTW we rely on ‘aggressive’ barn cats to keep the mice from chewing bags or the fanning mill😊
Tore the end of my finger off in 1959 when I was 4 on a old hand crank fanning mill. Me and my brothers always like to play with the old machinery and older brother was cranking it as fast as he could and I turned my hand swung and finger went right between two gears. Didn’t look anything like that one but was a interesting machine we used on the farm for cleaning seed oats.
Great efficiecy improvement. Just don't break the equipment.
Very neat setup! After watching your videos when you first got your fanning mill and got it working, it made me go out and buy one. Mine needs a little work to get it going like I want. There is just something really neat about these old fanning mills and watching them work. Thanks for sharing.
Cool. Thanks for sharing.
Fun stuff, Mike[s]! I have the same problem with a plexiglass side I put on the chunk catcher of my dust collection system in my basement shop. It loves to generate static and get coated with fine dust, making it nearly opaque some times. I used that so I could see when it was getting full.
Oh, and I laughed out loud at the "Disney lawsuit pending".
I wonder if you could put a bigger pulley on the elevator to slow it some? Seems to be really flying. I always enjoy watching these vintage machines run. Brings back memories of our Clipper Fanning Mill.
Good eye. I did have that cup elevator oversped by a fair margin. Its capacity was definitely the bottleneck on that machine, so I wanted it running as quick as possible without throwing corn everywhere. It worked fairly well for a whole winter, and then ultimately we upgraded to a more modern machine with a bagging auger.
Looks good! To bad there isn't a small grainy that you could line with scrap metal to store your bags at the fram.
Very cool !!!
Good work on the mill.
You should take a day to clean the shed up so you have more room just saying love the vids
That’s neat to see this older equipment running but why not just feel the bags off the auger? Is there something I’m missing.
This is fantastic! I wish I could purchase about 4 bags but the shipping to Phoenix would just be too much. I'm getting my whole kernel corn from Tractor supply now.
I really enjoy watching you use old equipment, and especially showing that doing these things can be done profitably. I work by piece rate painting storage sheds, the effects of being able to cut time per piece pays off quickly. You mentioned weighing your bags. Just wondering if there is any way you can put the scale under the bag that is filling? Would save a step as well as getting them basically spot on from the get go.
We started with a clipper 2B…now we have a Super 7 series and a full cleaning line 😉👍🏻. Keep progressing 🙂! You can use duct tape and a pant leg to keep the corn from flying out the auger end🙂
Now that's interesting! The Super 7s are big machines. I'd love to see one in action!
After using this Hero fanning mill all last winter, we upgraded in the spring of '21 to a Clipper M2B - the later all metal version with the bagging auger. So far this year I've run about 400 bags of oats through it and over 300 bags of corn. It was an amazing upgrade, and with Dad and I both working we can fill a bag a minute.
I'll have to try the pant-leg trick!
@@ravenviewfarm The M2B is a great machine. We don’t bag directly out of the screen machine 🙂. We do clean all our grain 👍🏻
That’s a neat little setup there. What are you using to shell the corn since you pick it on the ear?
Hi a used machinery guy here looks like he just got a Minneapolis Moline corn sheller on his lot looks good from driving by. PM me if you want me to stop and take pics of it for you
Why do you have to clean it? If hunters are buying it do they care if it has some cracks and little cob?
You're not the first to ask that question. I clean it so that the product is consistent, and because it's actually faster to put it through the cleaner with the bagging auger than it would be to fill bags right out of a gravity box. We upgraded to a better fanning mill last year, so we can really make good time with it. The machine can fill bags faster than I can handle them.
If I didn't clean the corn, some of the bags would be pristine, and others would be full of cob chunks and stalk pieces and dust. A few of my customers put the corn in automatic feeders that don't function well if the corn is dirty, and some folks run it in corn stoves - which can tolerate a little bit of debris, but not much.
I've got some past entrepreneurial experience, and I can tell you that customers want a consistent product. Doesn't matter what you're selling, it has to be the same all the time. Otherwise you'll hear about it. So I don't sell bags of dirty corn, simple as that.
From an efficiency point of view, wouldn't it be better to not clean the corn at all, since it's wildlife feed. Who cares if there's some debris in it?
If you ask a premium price, you need to offer a uniform premium product 🙂
You bring up a good point, so I'm going to start by saying that I absolutely agree with you. If we're talking strictly efficiency, then not cleaning it at all would save a whole step.
Here's why I choose to run it through the cleaner: Before I started selling wildlife feed, I did some market research. I talked to some folks who I knew bought bags of feed regularly. I haunted some online forums where hunters and conservationists hang out. I tried to find articles or blog posts by other farmers who were doing this, etc.
The biggest complaint I found from the consumer side was that they went to the store and bought a bag of corn, and when they dumped it out it was dirty. For most of them, it wasn't that they felt the deer or squirrels would be shocked and chagrined by the foreign material, but that they paid a premium price for something and then discovered that some part of it was junk, so it felt like they got even less useful product than they anticipated. It's not actually all that big of a problem, but it's the perception of the customer.
So I vowed that if I was going to sell wildlife corn, it had better be good and clean so that people felt they were getting what they paid for. Also, some folks use feeders with automatic mechanisms that dump some corn out every so often, and if the corn is dirty or has cob material in it, it can plug up these mechanisms. Same goes for people with corn stoves. They can handle some grit and cob pieces, but not a lot.
So my goal was to be able to offer a product that works for everyone - from the people who really don't care, to the ones that need really clean corn or would complain if it wasn't. Just keep it simple with one product that suits a lot of different customers. So far it's worked out pretty well.
Spoiler alert: Later on we upgraded to an even better fanning mill, and now we can clean and fill bags at an incredible pace. I think it's actually faster to run it through the cleaner than it would be to try to fill it right out of the wagon.
@@ravenviewfarm Thanks!