As I last posted, the wheat had been “scythed” (big garden shears) and left to dry. I had a couple of ideas on how to thresh it, but ultimately I built a replica of another person’s machine. They used two pieces of chain mounted to 1/4″ threaded rod, this was then lowered into a 5 gallon bucket of wheat and a drill applied free-hand. Sort of like a hand kitchen mixer. I though that was hokey, so I drilled a 1/4 pilot hole in my bucket base to serve as a bearing, with the free end poking through a similar hole in the lid. I used 1/4 steel rod, and brazed a washer 1/4″ from the end to serve as a thrust washer. I brazed two 4″ sections of chain to the rod, right at the thrust washer so the flails would scrape the bottom. It’s like a brush hog or weedwhacker, the flails beat the shit out of the heads and knock the berries out.

The first iteration

This is looking down into the bucket.

I first cut all the heads off the stalks, this worked excellent. Notice how the chaff is mostly the seed cover. This was easy to winnow, not much heavy chaff and it went in one step using a fan and a 4×4 piece of plywood.

This was the spring wheat, it yielded 1/3 of the winter  variety but looked fine. It was a smaller plot, but it wasn’t as good.

Next I said “let’s just toss the whole stem in” for the winter wheat. This didn’t work well, the stems wrapped around the axle up high and didn’t thresh much.  I added a second flail 6″ up, that did the trick and I was able to thresh the whole stalk. I had to get the corded Makita drill to spin it, the cordless was not happy with the load.

Notice how now there’s the normal combine harvester  discharge chute contents. Good, as you can avoid trimming but bad as it makes more trash and takes longer to fan winnow. I’m not sure it saves any time, you have to pick out more husks from the berries. They cling to some, vs. almost none with just the heads present. I got a lot more broken seed too. Maybe if I had a multistage thresher, and 4 flails, and a fancy winnower setup it would be a non-issue. But I’m not that motivated yet, this works ok for what I needed.   Here’s a shot of that winnowing:Final product

The yield was 2 1/2 cups of wheat berries per 9.25 sq ft. Doing the math, a 50’x50′ plot with good fertilizer should yield a years worth of wheat plus some seed.  Impressive, and finally it worked out. I will grind this and make bread, to complete the experiment. Chalk this up as a win…