Good weather and a great shell run.

The weather has been extraordinary the past week or so..
We have plenty of shells in storage to do us for quite a while...but YA CAN'T HAVE TOO MUCH

Called the new plant the other day and they are not shelling at present and likely be late in the week before they run the cracking plant again.

I remembered that they also have a second operation a few miles from the one we bought from earlier.

Called them and spoke with the manager...
C'MON DOWN he said

With the weather soooooo good this was an invite I was not gonna pass up.

Put the outfit together yesterday morning and we headed off on another adventure...

We get to the plant and the troops were happy to help


LESS THAN 10 MINUTES and we were in and out.

Our dumpster loaded to the brim we headed home.

Pulled into the yard and went to work.

The nuts are a fair bit smaller on this load and the weight was up too. (Guess based on how the rig handled)

Dragged out all the gear and we were off to the rodeo.
Best part was the price.....$20 for a large standard tote full
We can hold 1-1/2 totes full in the dumpster. $30

We ended up at ten 55 gallon barrels full on this run.

Today we will run some of the shells through Munchy and get it into the stove for a check ride...
Nice dry stuff....should be great.
The outbuilding slab is stuffed chuck azz full now.
I wish we had more room PIGGY

Some pics loading the dumpster, unloading and putting the dumpster back on the slab.

Little Red doing it's thing carrying the full barrels back to the out building.

Picture Shellrun2.4 BEST PART OF THE DAY Almost empty.
Put the tools away and unhook the outfit.....And a good time was had by all ...

 

That is a neat setup!

 

Thank you.

This entire rigging evolved over a couple years.

When we were in the dump trucking Bizzz it was a simple task.

Retirement dictated other avenues to accomplish the task.

Big thing was to make things as easy as possible for us old GEEEEZERS

 

Fed the horses and then got after running some shells from the new batch through Munchy...

Stuff looks great.

Will feed it to the wee stove here in a while.

 

I'm sure you have answered this already, but since I don't know...…...

Just exactly what type of nut shells are you burning?

 

Hazelnuts

We run the half round shells through "Munchy" (Built the machine to yield nice sized pieces that feed well)

MUNCHY....

 

Nice!

 

Building the Munch was a fun project.

Took a couple months of fab and machine work.

If ya want to surf through pages 1983 to 2000 you can read the story of Munchy.

 

Awsome,and great.

 

What a cool setup! It's really neat that you folks can heat with what was once a byproduct of another operation.

 

Thanks BB

The entire THING with the Munchy was the result of our long time supplier of nut shells having had to build a new "safer" cracking plant.

There had been an incident a few years ago with Salmonella being found on the premises of the plant (Turned out to be BS and the test sample was from bird poop the health folks found outside and not in the plant)
But the fallout and lawsuits were still a PITA..

The company decided to build an all new plant with AIR LOCKS to prevent birds from getting into the area where the nuts are processed.

Nobody is allowed in the processing area without special clothing to protect against contamination..

The new machinery cracks the nuts open and leaves pretty much only half shells, and these are transported to a large tank until they are hauled away.... (Kept dry)

The old plant used a large duct and trashfan system to remove all the shells and other material from the line and then deposit in a large tank with slide open gates to load trucks.

The shells were broken up well during the transport through the trash fans.

So early last season we learned of the fact that the shells would be half shells only (Few small pieces...but mostly halves)

The stoves can't readily burn the halves by themselves...

The plant manager offered to loan us a small "Field cracker" they used to test a customers crop (Usually a new customer or new orchard) to see what was in the nuts.... mold, empties, worms ...etc.

The little machine was slow but got us by.

The word at that time was that by this season (Fall 2019) they would have the old fan system back online in the new plant.

By late winter early spring the word came that the refit of the old system was not going to happen...

So I had to do something and fast...
The loaner machine was slow (45 minutes to crush a 55 gallon barrel full)

We were set for the last of the 18/19 season....but that left us hanging for the 19/20 season.

I took some measurements of the loaner and of the basic design.

It became real obvious that a larger machine that could move tonnage was needed.

Whatever came to fruition still had to be small enough to move by hand and easily fit in a small space in the basement..

I got to work with a sketch pad and pencil and after looking over the design of the loaner I decided that the general concept was fine but the new machine needed to be much larger and faster.

And that is the story of Munchy

So come this fall we were notified that we could no longer get shells from the plant as they did not want to deal with small loads.
The new management had decided to deal only with large companies that could haul the shells away in semi trucks.
We had been buying there for 27 years

The old system allowed me to weigh in (Light weight) and then head down to the hopper, back in and yank the gate open and fill our dumpster up...drive up, weigh out, pay and go.

The new system requires a company worker to get a couple of totes (4 x 4 x 4 boxes) full and then bring them out to the yard and fill us up..... COSTS LABOR $$$$

So we got told to go away.....not in so many words, but that was it.

So with our new "Munchy" ready to gitterdone we needed new suppliers.

We now have two companies happy to take care of us...one we had dealt with many years ago during a year with low crop yield and most of the crop was being sold in the shell..

For now it looks like we should be able to buy what we need readily.

Price is a bit higher @ 3 cents a pound at one plant and about 2 cents at the other.

Can't really get an accurate price from the one we saw the other day as they sell the stuff by the tote full (LUMP SUM COST) $20 tote
The dumpster holds about 1600 pounds chuck full.... so it shakes out to .01875 cents a pound.

Better than 3 cents a pound.

But the past 27 years were at 1-1/2 cents a pound....
With the cost of "Munchy" @ $800 (Materials) and the increase in travel time, plus the increase in the cost of the material....we are still on the front side of the curve.

Pellets run about 12-1/2 to 15 cents per pound (Depending on whats available)
Add the travel time....

The shells are still a great deal...
We have the physical work to haul and unload/process the stuff, but there is no free lunch no matter what we do....
Pellets would still need to be hauled and packed into the basement...so still have the gruntwork to do.

That's the story of Munchy

The vacuum unloading came about after I retired and sold the dump truck.

The dumpster was purchased in the fall of 2012 to haul the shells.
The first season we literally did a bucket brigade out of the tank and into the barrels.

Plain hard work for the two of us....There had to be an easier way.

Added the little drop gate....better.
Was using my shop vac one day and had a thought ??????

Tossed together the unit to allow direct transport of the shells into the barrels using vacuum. (Air transport)

It works well....could be faster, but it's good.


And life goes on...

 

Indeed.
A total waste product that does not require sacrificing anything else in the way of resources.
I am in no way an enviro freak...but using a waste product, especially one that renews every year just seems like a great idea..

 

I take it Munchy is a hammer mill?

 

Roll unit with an fixed anvil.
Rotor has 4 equally spaced bars welded to the outer circumference and machined to yield a clearance of .150" between the rotor and the edge of the bars.

These bars help to pull the material through between the rotor and the anvil.
This yields perfect sized pieces.

The anvil has the ability to easily open to clear jams from sticks ??????? or ????
An adjustable stop screw allow quick return to optimum clearance..(Barely missing the rotating bars...no metal to metal interference)

A 1-1/8" "Munchy Wrench" added to allow the anvil retaining bolt/nut to be loosened easily without having to go get a wrench (Stays on board)