At one point I thought there wasn't even going to be a season this year;
With learnings from last year I've been playing with the idea of making a home-built scratter for a while. The borrowed hand-cranked one I had last year went back to the owner and it had been very time consuming and a lot of effort to mill only 20kg of apples at a time anyway. Doing 6 gallons of juice took a good 12 hours because the pomace had to be put through the mill twice to get it fine enough for pressing.
So my slogan this year is less effort, more juice!
Looking into apple scratters has been an education, there's everything out there ranging from food industry-standard space-age stainless steel and alumium cold-fusion/hydrogen-cell powered contraptions - to home-built wooden framed hand-cranked old skool hoppers and drums, sometimes containing parts of re-purposed electric wheelchair motors, garden shredders, washing machine drums or lawn mower motors and blades, sometimes not. Prices range to match from nearly a grand to mere pennies. As it happened I did have a spare electric lawnmower and an old bench grinder that I could use the motor from and was considering lashing an electric motor-powered hopper/drum arrangement together on an old table frame.
But fortunately on balance it seemed that simplest of all and delivering throughput and a well-ground pomace is an electric sink waste disposal unit. A few youtube videos later and I'm ready to give it a stab.
The frame is built with bits from the leftover timber offcuts stash - the last of the 15mm structural hardwood sheet ply and some reclaimed model railway layout timbers.
Brand-new waste disposal units in the power category I want are about £300-ish (which in my book is too much to spend on something that will spend its life knocking around the barn and only get used a couple of times per year, however second-hand ones do turn up on ebay so all I need to do is to look for a lightly-used example and a small square aluminuium kitchen sink, and nice and cheap too.
So there you go. An Insinkerator model 66 - 0.75hp and a 980ml grind chamber capacity, comes with a sink already attached! In good hardly-used condition and mine for just £63 delivery included, lucky me. :^)
The power cord comes off the redundant Flymo and so is a waterproof and toughened flex. An illuminated on/off switch provides power to the disposal unit and is put where it can easily be got at if something goes wrong. The unit itself is controlled by a push-button/vaccum servo switch located next to the on/off.
The pommace then drops down a pipe and into the bucket. I now can't wait to try it out in earnest! So I just need a harvest of apples. But wait, there's a problem with that.... :^(
It's not been a good year for apples up this end of the Nadder valley with a late frost having arrived at just the wrong moment. Nothing on any of the fruit trees and only a handful of eating apples and just a smattering of crabapples.
But then, a saviour! A lady got in touch over the Nextdoor app who lives a few miles away across the border in Dorset in a sheltered valley and she has a mature orchard with about a dozen trees and has no use for the crop, might I be interested in helping myself?
So I have just had a very productive afternoon, 73kg of apples, 9kg of pears and 5kg of plums.
That should keep me occupied for a while. The orchard is very overgrown and the trees rather neglected and even though I stripped 2 trees and made inroads on another 4, there was still a lot left and I didn't like driving away and just leaving it, I may have to buy a few more fermentation buckets and make another trip...
I feel a perry coming on and will have to do that first as some of the pears are getting a bit squishy. Not so sure about the plums, they may get used for jam.
With learnings from last year I've been playing with the idea of making a home-built scratter for a while. The borrowed hand-cranked one I had last year went back to the owner and it had been very time consuming and a lot of effort to mill only 20kg of apples at a time anyway. Doing 6 gallons of juice took a good 12 hours because the pomace had to be put through the mill twice to get it fine enough for pressing.
So my slogan this year is less effort, more juice!
Looking into apple scratters has been an education, there's everything out there ranging from food industry-standard space-age stainless steel and alumium cold-fusion/hydrogen-cell powered contraptions - to home-built wooden framed hand-cranked old skool hoppers and drums, sometimes containing parts of re-purposed electric wheelchair motors, garden shredders, washing machine drums or lawn mower motors and blades, sometimes not. Prices range to match from nearly a grand to mere pennies. As it happened I did have a spare electric lawnmower and an old bench grinder that I could use the motor from and was considering lashing an electric motor-powered hopper/drum arrangement together on an old table frame.
But fortunately on balance it seemed that simplest of all and delivering throughput and a well-ground pomace is an electric sink waste disposal unit. A few youtube videos later and I'm ready to give it a stab.
The frame is built with bits from the leftover timber offcuts stash - the last of the 15mm structural hardwood sheet ply and some reclaimed model railway layout timbers.
Brand-new waste disposal units in the power category I want are about £300-ish (which in my book is too much to spend on something that will spend its life knocking around the barn and only get used a couple of times per year, however second-hand ones do turn up on ebay so all I need to do is to look for a lightly-used example and a small square aluminuium kitchen sink, and nice and cheap too.
So there you go. An Insinkerator model 66 - 0.75hp and a 980ml grind chamber capacity, comes with a sink already attached! In good hardly-used condition and mine for just £63 delivery included, lucky me. :^)
The power cord comes off the redundant Flymo and so is a waterproof and toughened flex. An illuminated on/off switch provides power to the disposal unit and is put where it can easily be got at if something goes wrong. The unit itself is controlled by a push-button/vaccum servo switch located next to the on/off.
The pommace then drops down a pipe and into the bucket. I now can't wait to try it out in earnest! So I just need a harvest of apples. But wait, there's a problem with that.... :^(
It's not been a good year for apples up this end of the Nadder valley with a late frost having arrived at just the wrong moment. Nothing on any of the fruit trees and only a handful of eating apples and just a smattering of crabapples.
But then, a saviour! A lady got in touch over the Nextdoor app who lives a few miles away across the border in Dorset in a sheltered valley and she has a mature orchard with about a dozen trees and has no use for the crop, might I be interested in helping myself?
So I have just had a very productive afternoon, 73kg of apples, 9kg of pears and 5kg of plums.
That should keep me occupied for a while. The orchard is very overgrown and the trees rather neglected and even though I stripped 2 trees and made inroads on another 4, there was still a lot left and I didn't like driving away and just leaving it, I may have to buy a few more fermentation buckets and make another trip...
I feel a perry coming on and will have to do that first as some of the pears are getting a bit squishy. Not so sure about the plums, they may get used for jam.
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