There wasn’t enough water to test the grain cleaner last time, after I finished fitting the screens. Although there has been a heat wave here this week, I was pleased that there was enough water on this visit.

I had arranged to meet Peter and Jill Frow, with whom I’ve been in contact since the beginning of the Reichenau Mill restoration. Peter has been intimately involved with that and although their restoration is complete and the Mill is in the hands of a full time operator, he is still involved in its management. This is his sectional drawing of Reichenau Mill.

My first job was to make a temporary hardboard lid for the short chute which feeds the grain cleaner, as last time I tested it, grain was thrown all over the upper floor! A galvanised steel cover is on order.

My friend Johnny Verreynne visited the Mill on Open Days, nearly four years ago, the 21^st January 2007, to be precise. On that occasion he promised some screens from an old threshing machine, which, he said, would be just what we needed to restore the grain cleaner.

The cleaner needed two grades of screen, one which would allow a grain of wheat through but nothing bigger, like husks, sticks and larger stones. Below that it needed a fine screen which no grain would go through, but through which dust would pass. Dust in this case, coming from the field as well as the threshing floor, which was often made of dung.

Homework for this week was lining the intermediate screen with the fibreglass mosquito netting which is slightly finer than the woven aluminium fly / mosquito net I’d used for the third stage.

There was very little water in the dam, but with the last bar removed completely from the weir, there was just enough to mill and demonstrate with. That was fine, because it meant I could concentrate on the sifter, while the mill idled away in the background, needing little supervision; just topping up directly into the hopper. There definitely wasn’t enough water to drive the elevator as well!

The plan is to demonstrate the rotary sifter producing three different grades of flour. It doesn’t matter what the grades are, some very fine flour must come out of the first stage, coarser at the next stage and coarsest out of the third. Should any whole grains still be present, they must come out of the bran chute at the end.

The first stage screen is in good order and in position. However, the second and third frames did not fit. The third had a very fine screen on it, so it must have come from another machine. The middle one had no screen at all, and had never had clips or a screen attached.

With the extra load from the working elevator, we’re noticing we need more power, and therefore, more water. The amount of water is governed by the sliding gates in the weir at the dam, added to any overflow (which diminishes as the water below it is consumed during the day); the height of the sluice gate and the opening in the wooden launder directly over the water-wheel. All these were arrived at by pure guesswork, and we’re only now noticing limitations.

I can easily make more slides in the weir. Only two of the five sections have slides built in. I can easily add an extension to the height of the sluice. On the Sunday of the second Open Gardens weekends, we ran as close to the sluice overflowing as we ever have.

There was an order from Zest Catering for 18kg of meal for each of the forthcoming Open Gardens Weekends, so I decided to do both batches together. I have been looking for an opportunity to put bigger volumes of grain through the elevator.

But first, there was a surprise! The rotary sieve bought at least a year ago from Joos Solms in Champagne Valley, Natal had arrived! We heard about the availability of the machine through Joos’ involvement in the Reichenau Mill project.

With Open Gardens weekends at the end of the month, I wanted to make sure the Elevator was working properly for the occasion. While I thought before that we’d only use the elevator on special occasions, it’s working so well that I think we’ll use it all the time! One of the concerns was that rodents might be a problem, but natural controls seem to have cured that problem completely. There are often grains lying on the floor from week to week from the experiments with the elevator, and nothing seems to be touched!

So I brought a long list of chores and materials which I tackled before even thinking of starting up the Mill. There was a cover to make for the inspection hole in the descending chute at the top, a hand-rail to get ready to put up over the water wheel and I had made up a shallow tray for sliding in under the elevator base for catching grains if it does have to be cleaned out.

Looking at the date, I notice we’re now exactly four years into the restoration of the Mill! 

During the week following the visit to Kleinplasie, I asked around for perforated plate to use in the upper and lower levels of the grain cleaner. We didn’t have measuring equipment with us whenn we examined the S Howes machine there and we didn’t think at the time to make a ‘rubbing’ on a piece of paper to pick up the size and the pitch of the holes to measure later. For the lower screen it doesn’t really matter, so long as the holes are smaller than the grains, yet big enough to let small stones and any dust through. I was given an offcut sheet which looked promising, yet when I tested some of the Organic grain from Wensleydale Farms, a lot of the grains went straight through and some stuck in the holes.

Friday 24^th September was Heritage Day. What better way of celebrating it than milling with a 200-year-old Water Mill?