Pictures of the apple mill I made,with help.

[Ryan Mooney]

The double roller is interesting and clearly beneficial. The efficiency of an apple mill is predicated on roughly three factors:

1. the power of the press (the more more powerful it is the less important the rest are)
2. the fineness of the grind
3. the rate of the pressing (slower is better otherwise the apples "cake" up and won't release the juice if you go to fast - kinda like case hardened wood).

Double crushing like this would help factor 2 a lot. I suspect that you could have left one of the lower rollers as an idler roller and had it work almost as well (this is common on grain roller mills, might be more problematic here due to the slipperiness of the apples). A floating scraper to peel the pulp off would probably help that (and wouldn't be a bad idea anyway)...

I also like the teeth, I've used screws (heads exposed) and old crosscut saw teeth for similar (the saw was toast so no loss, don't yell at me on this one guys - cut a kerf, cut the saw off just below the teeth and pressed into place, I think it might have been pinned in place as well but its been a long time), these look a lot better although I don't think they would get it fine enough alone (hence the second roller).

If you were doing a lot, I'd want the crusher on a platform so you didn't have to bend over to pickup the crushed apples.

Once again a nice build with a lot of subtle tricks if you look close enough

Thanks for posting!

[harry strasil]

Another post highlighting the craftsmanship and versatility of a truely remarkable craftsman. Way to go George and thanks for the post, it's very enlightning to this old Cobbler.

[Joe Fabbri]

Very nice work again, George. The whole machine looks very well built and stout. The work involved in the teeth is especially interesting. It's pretty amazing to see all that went into making these big machines back then. You really should have told your boss to stop going to England!