@Estokha, I am sorry you had an unpleasant experience with CM. Feel free to reach out to me directly. I work for Schutte Hammermill, and I manage our KannaMill brand. We were founded in 1928, and have been processing biomass for various industries since.
We launched our KannaMill brand back in 2017, and before our launch, we spent 2 years on R&D to develop a proprietary Hammer that works well with the Cannabis plant.
The problem with other Hammermill companies, when talking about production rates, they are based on processing corn and have done little testing with the Cannabis plant (which is not easy to process).
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That is really cool.
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Do you lose trichomes? I have heard that a hammer mill will degrade the cannabinoids due to dust flying everywhere.
@503DVS503, Since our KannaMill brand launched in 2017, we have not heard from our customers as this being an issue. Our KannaMillâs are âclosed loopâ, meaning no debris or dust will exit the Hammermill after the material has entered the feed chute. We have flex hoses and a collection bin with lid which collect the material.
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You can easily achieve that by alternating rapid sieving (using a stack of 4mm and 1mm sieve) and rapid grinding (only for few 10s of second) several times. It is even better if you use a hammer mill or a jaw crusher. Most of the wood will remain above 1mm.
I canât speak for @KannaMill 's offerings but the problem with a lot of hammer mills is that they run at such high speeds that they obliterate any part of the plant that they come into contact with. Iâve seen at least a few that have a poorly setup/tuned air handler/separator system, such that they end up throwing out a good amount of dust either into a filter/baghouse or the surrounding environment, and that dust has a high % of valuable cannabinoids. A VFD can allow you to slow down or adjust the speed of a hammer mill or air handling systemâs motor, but thereâs usually a tradeoff with throughput if you slow things down.
I know when I spoke with Munson and demoâed one of their grinders that they said if you just use the grinder without an air handler to put vacuum on the output side of the grinder, it slows down throughput by about 50%. I suspect this is why you see companies like JWC offering grinders that run at low speed & high torque, and have larger openings & shredder shafts to try and maximize output without separating valuable dust away from the rest of the shredded biomass
Regarding the OP question about separating the parts of the plant that contain negligible cannabinoids (stems/stalks/roots/seeds) from the high cannabinoid bud and leaf material, I agree with @cyclopath that they usually donât, though this is heavily dependent the farmer and their experience. I would love to have a system that separates those out, though at the current market prices of crude and toll extraction I worry that the ROI on such a system would take a long time. I suspect the way prices are racing to the bottom for extractors that it would be difficult to justify a higher $/lb extraction price (even if youâre billing for less weight extracted overall) for being able to only extract the leaf/bud material and leaving out the seeds, stems and stalk material. Though I wonder what the ROI would be if you consider solvent loss to stem/stalk material that contributes little to my extraction labâs outputs
As an alternative suggestion, you can buy hammer mills that run off a tractor PTO so you can control the RPM.
Edit: small scale example, but they come much larger http://www.wikco.com/hammermill.html
Not a bad idea if youâve got a tractor to run it, though from experience electricity is far more affordable than diesel, especially when you factor in maintenance. The thing I donât like about that one is how low to the ground the hammer mill is, IMO itâs better to have gravity drop out your shredded product rather than have an air handler move it around, especially if youâre going to slow down the shaft that drives the air handler fan
I agree on all points. We use a much larger unit that gravity drops, and offroad diesel consumption to run it isnât particularly high. We have quite a few tractors for our operation, so it made sense for our model.
I am considering both loss of solvent and the loss in oil yield. I am Thinking a range of screens to grind and sift the material. Do you think material can be âtoo fineâ for btu extraction? Iâve also thought about using a front load washing machine with vacuum hoses leading through the top of a few 55 gallon drums with vac hose getting smaller at exit of each drum.
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I donât know the answer to that, I do ethanol and if itâs ground too fine a bunch of small particles escape our extraction bags and plug our inline filters on a shorter timeframe than we would like them to. I would be concerned with compaction rate and the possibility of channeling and missing out on yield, but admittedly have less experience with butane extraction.
I think youâll find that going to a smaller vac hose will choke your whole setup, most shop vacs lose suction ability really fast when their hoses are restricted very much. I suspect for what youâre trying to do cyclonic separation may be a better option, and if you search that on eBay youâll turn up a few different options, most catered to woodworking, that can separate plant particles from an airstream, maybe something like this you could adapt to fit on top of a 55 gal drum?
@503DVS503, we use the below setup for our smaller KannaMillâs.
And this is our KannaMill 12 setup with the shop vacâŚ
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I donât know how much experience your target market has with this kind of equipment but if it were me I would never opt for a VFD set up like that, it should really have a large and visible E-stop and IMO, should also be inside of a NEMA 12 cabinet, even if your dust collection system works perfect thereâs still going to be a bunch of dust created by lifting and dumping biomass into the intake funnel for your mill and thatâs definitely going to end up sticking to the heatsink and airflow channels inside the VFD if it isnât adequately protected.
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Concur on the E Stop. Watched someone feeding branches into a hammer mill get their gloves pinched between two branches and almost get pulled in.
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@greenbuggy, appreciate the feedback. With the type of material this smaller scale machine can handle, we are only talking flower and small trim. There is a safety interlock on the side of the mill that is currently not visible. With the suction created by the shop vac, we have not had an issue with dust exiting the top of the chute. Noted on the protection of the VFD!
@Estokha, luckily no branches or stalk will be sent through this Hammermill and only flower and trim! I do agree that the amount of force on the larger Hammermills that we offer, if you are hand feeding, it can be quite powerful.
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FYI, Safety interlock is not the same as an emergency stop. If an operator is incapacitated an unfamiliar bystander/rescuer should be able to have a large and visible way to stop the machine, like one of the large mushroom style E-stop buttons with visible markings. I donât know the code citation exactly but Iâm fairly sure this is documented well in both OSHA and ANSI standards.
OSHA requirements for E Stops are an absolute pain in the ass. Iâd rather have two small companies than one large one that falls under OSHA. They forced us to place E Stops in an area where they were constantly activated inadvertently, and we were prevented from placing any type of bump guard around it.
I have a video of a machine a friend built. Itâs a prototype shucker. Pretty Amazing. I tried posting it but the files too large. It has a chain with hooks that pull whole plant through. The plant gets beat by rubber fingers. The stalk comes out the other end.
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I would use dual at triple vacuum motors