the thresher After grain plants are harvested, the dried plant can be put in the thresher where the grain is separated from the stalk. The bike powered swipples in the drum hit the seed heads or pods and break them apart so the seeds fall out. The design uses 1 x 10 finished lumber for the drum and all the power a person can supply while biking. The easily changeable swipples are made from wire, bike spokes, wood, and plastic or metal chain depending on the crop. The guage of the scalping screen (through which the threshed mate- rial falls) is also easily changed. The thresher can be used three ways: 1. as a batch process where the whole drum is filled with plant mate- rial, processed, and then the fibrous remains are removed. 2. as a pass-through process where seed heads are fed in through the right top window, get processed as they move to the left, and the empty seed heads are tossed out the left side window. 3. as a sheaf process, where sheaves of cut and aligned grain are held by their stalks with the heads thrust through a window on the side of the drum to be processed, after which the straw bundle is withdrawn and a new sheaf introduced.
1 MacDonald, James M, Penni Korb, and Robert A Hoppe. Farm Size and the Organization of U.S. Crop Farming, ERR-152. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service, August 2013 2 Donahue, Brian, et al. A New England Food Vision . Durham, NH: Food Solutions New England, University of New Hampshire, 2014 3 This project was a collaboration between Jan Ludovic Yoder (a fabricator), Olaf Bertram-Nothnagel (a filmmaker), and myself (a landscape architect). Lu and I worked together to develop the conceptual framing of the project, Lu developed the tools, I drew and developed the open-source plans, and Olaf made the instructional videos. 4 https://projects.sare.org/sare_project/one16-277/
on site review 39: tools
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