Using a air column separator to separate shells from nut meats of cracked black walnuts. This is second part of a two part series on cracking and sorting wild black walnuts in Michigan.
awesome, try feeding the material from the upper left and let it fall down past the shell inlet and be agitated to fall down to where you were feeding it in the video. It looks like you could dial in the pieces you wanted to keep or sort out by the air pressure. The great thing about this is that you have an interactive game that you could have your customers literally clean your nuts for you and they could pay for it. Sell the small pieces and shells as backyard bird and squirrel fodder by the pound. LOL, hey very inspiring.
Thanks for watching yeah I tried other ways of feeding it it did not work it won’t work like a typical seed cleaner there Hass to be more of a weight difference
What it you made the input shall with a textured material? Maybe it would help as the meat is smoother and would slide by easier? If my theory is correct it would end up pulling the meat through faster though. Idk its just thought that ran through my mind. Hello from a fellow Michigander!
Did you look at the air separated hulls to see if there was any nut meat that made it into there? Just wondering. You know what they say? Invention is the mother of necessity. Holds true every time. Great job! Thanks for sharing.
Sir FishSlayer Well it depends on how you throttle the air you can suck all the nut meet up with the hulls if you close down the air bypass all the way
Hey that's pretty good! I wonder if feeding them somewhere in the middle of that rippled column would work? By adjusting your air door accordingly leaving the opening at the bottom of the ripple column. Then your clean nuts, maybe might drop into the bottom of the column. Just a thought. Maybe you already tried it.
That's exactly what I'm planning to do but it would have to be a sealed off chamber if it's an open chamber that you add material through your decrease your suction a lot
Garden centers sell cheap augers for drills - to dig holes for bulb planting. Perhaps you can adapt one of these augers in a tube to make a screw feeder for your air sorter. You could use a handle or small motor to turn the auger. If you have a hopper above the screw feeder supplying the shell mix, the material in the hopper & tube should limit suction loss.
i'm so glad found your channel. we bought our place about 3 years ago and have approx. 100 walnuts on the property. now I have things to build and a continuation of the hobby. do you also tap the trees for syrup too?
This is fascinating. I would want to lengthen the path of the nuts and shorten the path of the shells. could there be a way to drop the nuts into the middle of the path while maintaining the air inlet at the bottom?
The length of the air column definitely needs to be lengthened I think you could drop the nuts and from the side down towards the bottom, but if you added it up in the middle of the column, it may defeat the purpose of adding a longer column for separation, but if I made another one, that’s how I would do it.
My first impression is that this system looks eerily similar to a Tesla Valve ( look it up). I know it's not exactly the same , it just kinda looks like one....
What is the oldest shelled black walnut that you’ve shelled,? I’ve heard that they can be kept for more than 10 years, I want know if there is any truth to that.
Z Douce Seems like three years is the longest that I have heard the longest that I’ve done with good results not saying you can’t go quite a bit longer but at that point a lot of it’s going to depend on how well it was stored like humidity and things insect damage etc.
I cracked some this week that have been sitting at room temperature for the last year. they were fine; I have more in the freezer, but didn’t have room for all of them.
Do you know if the shells are toxic? If not, I've seen them grind up pecan shells and sell them to add wood flavor to has grills. It'd sure be great to turn the shells into profit too.
gr8H8er they could be plus flavor is not good, I’ve gotten juice from husk in my eyes and it really burns. Pecans are flavorful like hickories which pecans are a type of
Michigan Hay Sales naw, that was the worst part of getting one! They'd say "Go fetch me a switch!" and we'd have to go find a good one and bring it back to get whooped with!
the other way i thought might work but a person would have to experiment this out . would be to see if the shells or the hulls react differently to gas say carbon monoxide or natural gas or perhaps some other gas .
real truth would have to be a closed system with great expense and complexity. The beauty of this system is how simple and easy it is to construct there is not much money in Black Walnuts so if you spend way too much time and money constructing it it kind of makes it worthless to do.. Thanks for watching.
I wonder if making a hole on the side with a way to add material than you would not be repeating the process and good meat would drop out bottom. Maybe a small auger slowly adding material.
@@michiganhay7844 i mean the section directly to the right thats empty. Instead of feeding them through the hole you could drop them through the area directly to the right of the opening with a catch basin for the meat.
@@michiganhay7844 I've done it the last two years, takes a lot of salt but the meats float and 90% of the shells sink. Do it immediately after cracking so less oil transfers to the shells. Works great for the 'chicken feed' material you're feeding the birds too :)
@@michiganhay7844 No videos. There's one big pot with salt water in it and another with fresh rinse water. I pour the material into the salt pot, wait a half-minute, and use a strainer to scoop the meats off the top. They go into the rinse for a minute and are dipped out again and spread on brown paper to dry. When I clean the salt pot there's a thick layer of shells at the bottom - no meats at all - but some tiny shells do float so I have to pick them out by hand. I'll try making videos this year of my whole process, I'm not a welder so my equipment is quite different from yours.
Heard of some people using a salt water solution to separate the shell from the meat; the meat floating, while the shell sinks. Don't recall the solution percentage of salt/H2O, but it seemed a LOT faster than this.
Never was able to get it to consistently work however just regular water separation works awesome for hickory nuts can’t seem to get it to work for walnuts
@@michiganhay7844 I've tried neither, but since I've collected 150 gallons of hulled nuts in what is so far 1/2-way through the season here in KY; I'ma give it a try. Great job with building the machine. Also, I'm curious about the mad face you gave the camera @4:17; like someone farted or something. =D
@@thisguy8916 yeah I’m not sure nobody else was around when I made the video so I’m not sure about the face but I do know somebody that tried the water separation with salt last year and I tried it and I think you got to do it shortly after cracking the nuts when they have lotta oil in them it seem to work best then as they got dryer it seem to have less likely work but yeah I agree if somebody wants to perfect it and give me all the details I’d love to hear about it but what it did is gotten gave me a whole bunch of really tiny walnut pieces with a whole bunch of tiny shell pieces stocked to them and that really sucked
Like I say I’ll run the hickory nuts through the cracker I have a video about processing them I put all the shell pieces and everything in stock pot on my stove and simmer it on low heat and the hickory nuts off float to the top perfectly
brandon krause Somebody mentioned a salt brine solution but I’ve never tried it I’ve tried it with regular water and it does not work I do use water separation with hickories simmering and heating it the nutmeat actually floats in the shell sink does not work with walnuts though
Hi Ray, thanks for sharing your expertise with the black walnut society. Can you tell me how much time was required overall to obtain your final yield of 3.06#? Here is how I clean my black wlanuts...yield of 7-8 nuts/minute. The reason I clean them this way is that I find that the husk residue leaves a certain foul taste to the nutmeats. My wife could tell me the difference with precision since she has an acute sense of taste...but unfortunately she does not like black walnut! (let me know if you don't like having unsolicited links on your videos). Keep up the good work. ruclips.net/video/Qq4hnH6YM7Q/видео.html
Thanks for the prompt answer Ray. Actually I wanted to know the time required to get your 3.06# of nutmeats from the bushel of dry nuts. From what you're saying it would be under an hour since you have to add some time for the air screening and the final manual seperation to the half hour required for the initial cracking. I live on the island on Montreal. There are not that many black walnut trees in this area. I believe all these trees have been planted. Some say the American Loyalists brought some seedlings when they fled the the US in the late 1700's and early 1800's. I only harvest a couple hundred pounds of raw nuts year in, year out, mostly at one location. There are however more and more nut tree enthousiasts in this area.
DovidM You are referring to the huske unit? yes the husker can crack the nuts if you run it too aggressively and it won’t work with English walnuts it destroys those. The air separator does not pulverize the meats at all though if you left them in there for a really long time and let them tumble the polish i though and does grind them down a bit
From an engineering standpoint, you have the 'idea', but it is not well-executed here. What you are doing is using pressure (air) to move material for sorting. All fine and well, but if you are trying to use air pressure differences to move-and-sort, what you may want to try is placing your lower-pressure (vacuum device) on the RIGHT vertical wall (most-likely, mid-wall to upper-mid wall), and then controlling your chamber pressure with a variable diameter orifice (slide-in plates, maybe) where you are feeding the aggregate into. This would make your air intake where your aggregate is currently, and then a constant higher pressure across a 'gravity drop point' (your right angular chamber) so that heavies fall out. This would simulate 'gold panning' with lighter 'flour gold'...where the 'flour gold' is almost identical in mass to the black magnetite sand it is often found in. The 'trick' is to find the 'magic spot' of chamber 'width' on that right side to give time for the 'nut meat' to fall out of the vacuum, while the solids stay in the weir chamber due to air vortex and friction. I have not done this myself, but in watching the mechanics of what you are trying to do, it seems you are simply working in a 'hydraulic environment' to simulate gold extraction.
Skeeter Saurus thanks for the information, but really looking more at aerodynamic profile for lift, not pressure. I’m a farmer and not a engineers but if you were to build a system and show it working that would be great. I have plenty of people give suggestions such as us but nobody’s showing me an actual working model so I think this is pretty practical and works.
Your idea is interesting. I wonder if you could post a link to some information about this gold flour. It’s not an identical situation though, because the densities of the nut meat in the shells are virtually identical. The device shown separates them using airflow, not floating versus sinking through a controlled pressure gradient. the flatter shells and woody parts behave more as sails, while the rounder nut meat is less affected by the airflow. The principle of upward blowing air moves The shells generally upward, and the nuts generally downward. The slope, shape Of channel, length, input mechanism, and air velocity are all variables that could potentially be adjusted.
Everybody sees that, however, I’ve never seen anybody really do it with a lot of success . You don’t really even need salt water just use regular water with heat but actually, it really doesn’t work very good
I have a half acre full of these dang trees. They rot on the ground and hit things for 3 months a year. If you have one.....cut it down. You'll thank me later.
This is really fantastic. Very helpful. If you did further experimentation, I’d be super interested to hear about it.
Black Walnuts are the bomb but jeeze they're hard to shell. LOL great machines.
Thanks Ray for sharing. Always appreciate it!
Cool thanks for the info. You inspired me to get out there and finish cleaning my black walnuts
Thank you
awesome, try feeding the material from the upper left and let it fall down past the shell inlet and be agitated to fall down to where you were feeding it in the video. It looks like you could dial in the pieces you wanted to keep or sort out by the air pressure. The great thing about this is that you have an interactive game that you could have your customers literally clean your nuts for you and they could pay for it. Sell the small pieces and shells as backyard bird and squirrel fodder by the pound. LOL, hey very inspiring.
Thanks for watching yeah I tried other ways of feeding it it did not work it won’t work like a typical seed cleaner there Hass to be more of a weight difference
@@michiganhay7844 i remember you saying that now in the video.
What it you made the input shall with a textured material? Maybe it would help as the meat is smoother and would slide by easier? If my theory is correct it would end up pulling the meat through faster though. Idk its just thought that ran through my mind.
Hello from a fellow Michigander!
Pgt DIY Not sure it’s all trial and error the only issue is you always have to build one and see how it works thanks for tuning in
i give you credit for developing this very good maybe steam instead of just air then a dryer
real truth thank you sounds pretty complicated to add steam and a dryer to the set up
Did you look at the air separated hulls to see if there was any nut meat that made it into there? Just wondering.
You know what they say? Invention is the mother of necessity. Holds true every time. Great job! Thanks for sharing.
Sir FishSlayer Well it depends on how you throttle the air you can suck all the nut meet up with the hulls if you close down the air bypass all the way
Hey that's pretty good! I wonder if feeding them somewhere in the middle of that rippled column would work? By adjusting your air door accordingly leaving the opening at the bottom of the ripple column. Then your clean nuts, maybe might drop into the bottom of the column. Just a thought. Maybe you already tried it.
That's exactly what I'm planning to do but it would have to be a sealed off chamber if it's an open chamber that you add material through your decrease your suction a lot
Eventually you could work with a closed system, where the exhaust connects to a larger funnel like feeding chamber.
Put some form of gasket seal or threaded opening.
Garden centers sell cheap augers for drills - to dig holes for bulb planting. Perhaps you can adapt one of these augers in a tube to make a screw feeder for your air sorter. You could use a handle or small motor to turn the auger. If you have a hopper above the screw feeder supplying the shell mix, the material in the hopper & tube should limit suction loss.
i'm so glad found your channel. we bought our place about 3 years ago and have approx. 100 walnuts on the property. now I have things to build and a continuation of the hobby. do you also tap the trees for syrup too?
This is fascinating. I would want to lengthen the path of the nuts and shorten the path of the shells. could there be a way to drop the nuts into the middle of the path while maintaining the air inlet at the bottom?
The length of the air column definitely needs to be lengthened I think you could drop the nuts and from the side down towards the bottom, but if you added it up in the middle of the column, it may defeat the purpose of adding a longer column for separation, but if I made another one, that’s how I would do it.
Quite inventive
My first impression is that this system looks eerily similar to a Tesla Valve ( look it up). I know it's not exactly the same , it just kinda looks like one....
Where does the nut meat go?
What is the oldest shelled black walnut that you’ve shelled,?
I’ve heard that they can be kept for more than 10 years, I want know if there is any truth to that.
Z Douce Seems like three years is the longest that I have heard the longest that I’ve done with good results not saying you can’t go quite a bit longer but at that point a lot of it’s going to depend on how well it was stored like humidity and things insect damage etc.
I cracked some this week that have been sitting at room temperature for the last year. they were fine; I have more in the freezer, but didn’t have room for all of them.
Very clever
Very cool!
Thanks
Do you know if the shells are toxic? If not, I've seen them grind up pecan shells and sell them to add wood flavor to has grills. It'd sure be great to turn the shells into profit too.
gr8H8er they could be plus flavor is not good, I’ve gotten juice from husk in my eyes and it really burns. Pecans are flavorful like hickories which pecans are a type of
Michigan Hay Sales trust me, I picked my fair share of hickory switches in my youth!
gr8H8er What to give somebody a woopin?
Michigan Hay Sales naw, that was the worst part of getting one! They'd say "Go fetch me a switch!" and we'd have to go find a good one and bring it back to get whooped with!
That's perty slick.
Thanks
Pretty cool...get the bugs worked out and you’ve got a really good invention.
Les Lieb Thanks I think I got a pretty dialed in now
@@michiganhay7844 what improvements were implemented over the year?
James Trotman it’s more about the timing of volume of material and whiat air setting to put it at. Did you build one?
the other way i thought might work but a person would have to experiment this out . would be to see if the shells or the hulls react differently to gas say carbon monoxide or natural gas or perhaps some other gas .
real truth would have to be a closed system with great expense and complexity. The beauty of this system is how simple and easy it is to construct there is not much money in Black Walnuts so if you spend way too much time and money constructing it it kind of makes it worthless to do.. Thanks for watching.
I wonder if making a hole on the side with a way to add material than you would not be repeating the process and good meat would drop out bottom. Maybe a small auger slowly adding material.
I tried adding from the top and it didn’t seem to work too well
@@michiganhay7844 it’s a case of hit and miss but you got a nice start on it.
@@johnhalter7287 Yeah it’s kind of like reverse engineering making something see if it works and then having to remake it again
You could load your bits into that unused portion so it'd be self loading.
JoeBob Jenkins that is the section shells are deposited
@@michiganhay7844 i mean the section directly to the right thats empty. Instead of feeding them through the hole you could drop them through the area directly to the right of the opening with a catch basin for the meat.
Have you ever tried a saltwater mix??
I have not but I know people have tried it didn’t work
@@michiganhay7844 I've done it the last two years, takes a lot of salt but the meats float and 90% of the shells sink. Do it immediately after cracking so less oil transfers to the shells. Works great for the 'chicken feed' material you're feeding the birds too :)
Paul Kline like to see a video of the process do you have anything?
@@michiganhay7844 No videos. There's one big pot with salt water in it and another with fresh rinse water. I pour the material into the salt pot, wait a half-minute, and use a strainer to scoop the meats off the top. They go into the rinse for a minute and are dipped out again and spread on brown paper to dry. When I clean the salt pot there's a thick layer of shells at the bottom - no meats at all - but some tiny shells do float so I have to pick them out by hand. I'll try making videos this year of my whole process, I'm not a welder so my equipment is quite different from yours.
What's the ratio salt to water that you use?
Heard of some people using a salt water solution to separate the shell from the meat; the meat floating, while the shell sinks. Don't recall the solution percentage of salt/H2O, but it seemed a LOT faster than this.
Never was able to get it to consistently work however just regular water separation works awesome for hickory nuts can’t seem to get it to work for walnuts
@@michiganhay7844 I've tried neither, but since I've collected 150 gallons of hulled nuts in what is so far 1/2-way through the season here in KY; I'ma give it a try. Great job with building the machine. Also, I'm curious about the mad face you gave the camera @4:17; like someone farted or something. =D
@@thisguy8916 yeah I’m not sure nobody else was around when I made the video so I’m not sure about the face but I do know somebody that tried the water separation with salt last year and I tried it and I think you got to do it shortly after cracking the nuts when they have lotta oil in them it seem to work best then as they got dryer it seem to have less likely work but yeah I agree if somebody wants to perfect it and give me all the details I’d love to hear about it but what it did is gotten gave me a whole bunch of really tiny walnut pieces with a whole bunch of tiny shell pieces stocked to them and that really sucked
Like I say I’ll run the hickory nuts through the cracker I have a video about processing them I put all the shell pieces and everything in stock pot on my stove and simmer it on low heat and the hickory nuts off float to the top perfectly
@@michiganhay7844 It's all really cool to me, as it reminds me of spending time on my father's familial farm in Pennsylvania.
I feel like theres gotta be some solution in which only the shell would float. No idea tho. Nice video man!
brandon krause Somebody mentioned a salt brine solution but I’ve never tried it I’ve tried it with regular water and it does not work I do use water separation with hickories simmering and heating it the nutmeat actually floats in the shell sink does not work with walnuts though
Automate the feeding.
Hi Ray, thanks for sharing your expertise with the black walnut society. Can you tell me how much time was required overall to obtain your final yield of 3.06#? Here is how I clean my black wlanuts...yield of 7-8 nuts/minute. The reason I clean them this way is that I find that the husk residue leaves a certain foul taste to the nutmeats. My wife could tell me the difference with precision since she has an acute sense of taste...but unfortunately she does not like black walnut! (let me know if you don't like having unsolicited links on your videos). Keep up the good work. ruclips.net/video/Qq4hnH6YM7Q/видео.html
Thanks for the prompt answer Ray. Actually I wanted to know the time required to get your 3.06# of nutmeats from the bushel of dry nuts. From what you're saying it would be under an hour since you have to add some time for the air screening and the final manual seperation to the half hour required for the initial cracking.
I live on the island on Montreal. There are not that many black walnut trees in this area. I believe all these trees have been planted. Some say the American Loyalists brought some seedlings when they fled the the US in the late 1700's and early 1800's. I only harvest a couple hundred pounds of raw nuts year in, year out, mostly at one location. There are however more and more nut tree enthousiasts in this area.
Yes, that is right
I’m surprised that the nut meats aren’t pulverized by this.
DovidM You are referring to the huske unit? yes the husker can crack the nuts if you run it too aggressively and it won’t work with English walnuts it destroys those. The air separator does not pulverize the meats at all though if you left them in there for a really long time and let them tumble the polish i though and does grind them down a bit
No they have a dry
From an engineering standpoint, you have the 'idea', but it is not well-executed here. What you are doing is using pressure (air) to move material for sorting. All fine and well, but if you are trying to use air pressure differences to move-and-sort, what you may want to try is placing your lower-pressure (vacuum device) on the RIGHT vertical wall (most-likely, mid-wall to upper-mid wall), and then controlling your chamber pressure with a variable diameter orifice (slide-in plates, maybe) where you are feeding the aggregate into. This would make your air intake where your aggregate is currently, and then a constant higher pressure across a 'gravity drop point' (your right angular chamber) so that heavies fall out. This would simulate 'gold panning' with lighter 'flour gold'...where the 'flour gold' is almost identical in mass to the black magnetite sand it is often found in. The 'trick' is to find the 'magic spot' of chamber 'width' on that right side to give time for the 'nut meat' to fall out of the vacuum, while the solids stay in the weir chamber due to air vortex and friction.
I have not done this myself, but in watching the mechanics of what you are trying to do, it seems you are simply working in a 'hydraulic environment' to simulate gold extraction.
Skeeter Saurus thanks for the information, but really looking more at aerodynamic profile for lift, not pressure. I’m a farmer and not a engineers but if you were to build a system and show it working that would be great. I have plenty of people give suggestions such as us but nobody’s showing me an actual working model so I think this is pretty practical and works.
Your idea is interesting. I wonder if you could post a link to some information about this gold flour. It’s not an identical situation though, because the densities of the nut meat in the shells are virtually identical. The device shown separates them using airflow, not floating versus sinking through a controlled pressure gradient. the flatter shells and woody parts behave more as sails, while the rounder nut meat is less affected by the airflow.
The principle of upward blowing air moves The shells generally upward, and the nuts generally downward. The slope, shape Of channel, length, input mechanism, and air velocity are all variables that could potentially be adjusted.
I thought nuts came from a nut house , such as the white house.
Can’t argue that
Working too hard. Salt water makes the meat float and the shell sink. Once the meat is skimmed off rinse and enjoy.
Everybody sees that, however, I’ve never seen anybody really do it with a lot of success . You don’t really even need salt water just use regular water with heat but actually, it really doesn’t work very good
I’d turn into milk
Pero no seas egoistas por que no mostras bien como es el planito de armado
Wish I could read what you’re writing
I have a half acre full of these dang trees. They rot on the ground and hit things for 3 months a year. If you have one.....cut it down. You'll thank me later.
SKMC69 funny
black walnut is a good tree.. pig and chicken food, HQ timber, light shade.
call me i will come pick them up for you
this last season we picked up 10,000 pounds of walnuts after they were out of the green husk @16 cents a pound or 16 dollar a hundred pounds
So are kids, but we still kep them for some reason..