With the assortment of cramps off the base of the elevator, everything seemed to stay in place; it just needed a run over with the belt sander. There is a piece chipped away, but this will not affect the operation and once the new wood is darkened to the same colour as the rest of the elevator, it should not be noticeable.
There was just one job to finish on the downward trunk of the main elevator, that was the collar, or skirting where the trunk passes through the upper floor, and which aligns the upper and lower sections of the trunking.
The lighter piece was made from an offcut from the batch of Oregon which Keith Wetmore organised; there isn’t much left!
A galvanised steel lining was cut and bent up during the week, so I was keen to see whether it would allow the meal to flow more easily.
Try saying that after a couple of glasses of Beaumont Wine!
In the week, I had a piece of galvanised sheet cut and bent up and covered it with the ever diminishing supply of offcut Oregon floor planking.
The top end of the short chute needed to be tidied where it joins with the original trunking, both at the upper end and, on the lower side, where it joins the chute to the Stamford Mill.
On the top edge, I peeled the metal lining off (it’s tacked on) and sawed off the protruding wood with a hacksaw blade, and bent and re-attached the lining. That was easy! At the join with the Stamford chute, I had hoped to be able to bend a single metal strip and attach both ends, one to each chute, but the angles were too complicated. Instead, each chute has an extension to its existing lining, and they just touch up together at the top, in line with the run of the main chute, so that either or both can be blocked off to allow grain to proceed past them to the Vitruvian’s chute.
Johan Coertze’s idea last week to rock the delivery chute to the Vitruvian Mill longways like the sieves in a threshing machine made the best sense. I have since heard from Ray Killian that many of the chutes in the wonderful roller mill in Springbok are suspended in ‘slings’. My first idea was to have some kind of face cam on the end of the shaft which protrudes from the grain cleaner, then I realised that the grain cleaner also rocks like that, why not pick up the motion from that, through a 90 degree bell-crank?
For the suspension of the chute, eight hinges from my supply of old fittings will work well.
The good news is that the chute is moving back and forth and grain flows! It remains to be seen how wet the grain can be at the present inclination and whether the angle must be tilted further. But I’m getting ahead of myself!
In the last report, I was still looking for some Oregon planking to cover the metal of the chute with. On the same day I bought some fascia which would have worked, but was too thick and I don’t have a thicknesser; however on a call-out to a broken tractor, I found myself standing next to two planks, just what I needed, about to be used for concrete shuttering! They were quickly loaded and it didn’t take long to cover the metal trough and glue and tack the whole lot together. The upper end also got an end-stop.
Having done some marking on the wooden plug for the chute to the Stamford last week, I did some sawing at home. At the Mill, I removed some big-headed tacks from the metal plates lining the chute and sanded the plug all over to fit nicely into the trough and tried it out.
Since October 2006, Andy Selfe has devoted most of his spare time to the restoration to full working order of the Water Mill at Compagnes Drift Farm, Bot River, Western Cape. Although the Mill had been preserved carefully by the Beaumont family since they took over the farm, it required the restoration of the water wheel, the 'launder' and the tail race to get the water wheel turning again after probably 50 years of standing idle. Once that was done, the original 200-year-old 'Vitruvian' or built-in Mill needed to be rebuilt, as all the woodwork, or 'furniture' was missing.
Sandstone Heritage Trust - News
January/February 2006
Credits to Farm & Horticultural Equipment Magazine, published by Kelsey Publishing,