All great comments, folks! Thank you!
It’s easier for the harvest crew to brick the bags vs finessing the vac sealer. If they don’t go tight enough, it stores and stacks poorly and is easily split open with some rough handling. Bricks seem to be more durable.
What about an air hammer/chisel with a blunt end bit? You can control the level of intensity with the trigger. Like what is used to cut out auto body panels?
Good points about storing practicality with bricks. It’s easy to turn the harvest crew into a rolling freight train of efficiency. But, that doesn’t always take the full cycle into account. If that’s the process you’ve landed upon and as a whole it is most efficient for you, then send it. I’d just make the point that a lot of the issues of not over vaccing such as stacking can be fixed with totes, etc. As an extractor, I believe that over vaccing can hurt your yields. When I run over vac’d products, it is hard to get gas to penetrate the whole (usually larger and compacted) chunks. Just do some side by side yield and time studies (that includes the extra crushing time) before you settle on over vac’ing. Harvesting takes some finesse and training.
Yes, I’ve considered that, but our pneumatic sock packer packs it much denser than it ever gets vac sealed.
I’ve been thinking about a blacksmith style auto-hammer with a chilled table
We tried it with frozen. Works well. Gotta work fast, but it works.
do you keep your packer in the freezer or are you making pucks outside the freezer?
Pedal powered prototype?
It could probably work well so long as there isn’t a ton of twisting action to rip bags. I’d recommend something with a trigger lock and controlling intensity through PSI to save your hand over time. We just glued half a rubber mallet head on the rammer, and it’s there 2.5 years later.
Outside the freezer. Smashed bags go back in a chest freezer and then get socked 20# at a time.
We pre-chill the packer tube with liquid CO2 before beginning.
The goal is to get the whole process done in a freezer, though. That’s where we’d keep the grinder also.
Has anyone found a good source for a cryogenic mill larger than benchtop scale?
want to bet that it looks almost identical to a plastics shredder under than cover?
Also seems like it’d be easy to mod, if needed.
Thank you. Wrong again
Wondering if something like this might work better?
That’s the exact method we use. We pull the FF patties from the chest freezer and sandhammer in a walk in cooler to get the material into extraction socks. The socks then go into a -80C freezer before extraction. With a team of 3 people we can pack 220 lbs of material into socks in about 40 minutes while keeping everything cold. That strawberry block breaker looks very interesting though…
I kinda want to try building a rudimentary one as a proof of conceptual application.
These are the times I wish I knew how to tig and machine stuff.
