Tin Mill

Korero (AEWS), Volume 2, Issue 7, 10 April 1944, Page 10

Tin Mill

Only needing six men, the tin mill is smaller, slower, but more portable and can be owned by an individual farmer. It’s designer should have been Heath Robinson, for it is an ingenious and efficient tangle of wheels, belts, knives, forks, pulleys, string, wire, sheet galvanized iron, trap-doors, vents, and pipes. He’s a rowdy chap, this progressive offspring of the old “ mill.” Apart from a galvanized-iron framework and a bent chimney through which straw is blown out, father and son are alike in construction. Sheaves, their binding cut, are fed by a short travelling canvas, into a drum spinning at about 1,200 r.p.m. The beaters on this drum revolve within its casing just clear enough to tear the grain from the stalks. Grain and straw fall on to shakers (sieves moving frantically to and fro) through these to riddles and thence into a “ screen ” (a drum made of wire wound spirally). Straw and husks are caught by shakers and riddles and blown away “up the spout ” ; broken grain, wild turnips, fat-hen, and other weed seeds fall through the screen where they can, and the threshed and clean grain comes through the end of the screen and is fed through a hopper into a bag. Actually four grades of threshed grain are separated—seconds, broken wheat, and rubbish. The rubbish, consisting of the fat-hen seed, &c., is worth a few pence a pound as bird-seed. Some farmers, however, do not think it worth while collecting.

The tin mill is easily driven by a tractor, and what with the engine, the bolts, pulleys, drum, blower, shakers, and riddles it makes the world’s own din. But it does the job. Sixty bushels an hour, and you might thresh 15 acres of a 50-bushel crop in one day.

As on the big mill, work is heavy, especially if you are handling the bagging end of the mill. Bag and wheat together

weigh 203 lb., and the bags are weighed and sewn up beside the mill. They are then carried a short distance to the dump of full bags, and here’s a hint for har vesters. If you don’t want to lift the bag, dig a hole in the ground and stand in it so that the bag will lean straight over on to your back from the sewing-up platform.

This 6 in. or 8 in. makes a lot of difference when you are carrying 200 lb.