Impact Dehuller and Separator

Some Spelt I ordered was supposed to be hulled, but ended up just being partially hulled and cleaned up so I went back to work on my improved Spelt hulling equipment.  I had 1,500lbs and got it hulled and clean enough to use in about 1 ½ days after spending a week total building/testing/tweaking various versions of this thing.  The key thing is just the series of ¼" hardware cloth screens that the hulls/grain bounce off which is an old-school technique I had heard about.  The yield of about 1,200lbs means that this is at least twice as fast as what I have done before with more manual methods and two passes through a seed cleaner.  It works well enough without a cyclone (I used a second leaf blower on suction that pulled out a fair amount of the lightweight stuff), but with a cyclone pulling out more of the volume would be that much faster.  With an auger to load the hopper at the top, this could be essentially fully automated.  The hopper would often stick and I’d have to tap it or change the gap to affect the flow rate.  Final output would have been improved to go through a seed cleaner, but I been getting by with just milling and sifting (see my separate tool on this site for a decent capacity sifter you can build).  The 1,200lbs took two passes.  30 bags became about 15 which became about 6.  I’m not sure if I could have gotten any grain from a third pass through the hulling mechanism - I was running out of time.  The commercial hullers all need two passes anyway. I want to try this in a second season before posting a full build sequence and materials, but I thought I could put this out there as a draft. I think the nifty trick in all this is the < $100 electric leaf blower/bagger with a relatively smooth metal blade which impact hulls the Spelt (I don't know how it would work on rice or other grains but they certainly have to be hard - I don't think oats would work). This machine has a nice high throughput and decent hull rate and my problem before had just been slowly metering the input and then separating the output for another pass. Putting the huller at the bottom of this separator screens produces nice metered output and makes sure that the grains that are already hulled coming out of the combine (< 15%?) get separated before they are damaged in the huller.  This impact hulling setup breaks some grains, but I think my increase in capacity makes up for it versus the lower capacity abrasion-based hulling. For my purposes at least in a high heat/humidity climate, I want to get the grains hulled and cleaned and stored in my sealed 5 gallon buckets ASAP to avoid the pests and to lock-in my desired moisture content for storage.