In case you don't know already I like to work with fruit. Why do I like to work with fruit? Because in my area I can often get it for free. Free fruit is my second favorite kind of fruit. My favorite kind of fruit is free fruit somebody else picks
Last year I did around 1,000 pounds of apples, this year I hope to get at least as many but have been working on improving my apple equipment to make it easier to work all these apples. Since the fruity goodness thread got rather long and somewhat difficult to find certain things in I decided to start a new thread showing people the madness to my method in regards to my equipment.
The first thing you need to understand about me is I am a cheap bastard and have almost no budget for equipment. The second thing is I actually like seeing just how cheaply I can make things. I also like free booze. With all that in mind I still need apple processing equipment.
Some years back when I began working with fruit I did it a slow tedious way, meticulously collecting apples, chopping them into pieces, deworming and coring them, then grinding them up in a food processor before finally pressing them in a 3 gallon press I picked up at an auction. The real problem with this method was how long it took. It could take 2 or even 3 hours of work just to get a gallon to a gallon and a half of apple juice. Fortunately I tend to have an hour or two of free time when I'm at work but it was painfully obvious that it greatly limited the total amount of apples I could process and thus the total amount of booze I could make. I tried using a juicer, which worked OK but was not a lot faster and I felt the juice and Brandy were lacking depth. So I set about trying to come up with a low budget high speed alternative.
One of the things I considered was buying a Harbor Freight chipper shredder. Some members have used them with great success but they are $150. Granted with a 20% off coupon it only comes to $120 but there are size limits to the apples. I really wanted something I could just dump my apples into regardless of size. Another alternative was the barrel type grinder that most people use. My intention was to eventually build one of those and I started accumulating parts to do that. The big obstacles in this was finding something suitable with the drive shaft, my preference would be stainless steel and I wasn't finding any suitable SS rod. Then one day Yakattack suggested using a morter mixer in a bucket. I thought this was a pretty good idea, so I headed down to my local Lowe's to look for a mixer. What I found was a bunch of them in the discount rack on clearance for $3.75 So I bought 2 and used one for the original apple chopper.
If you want to read about the previous incarnations of the apple chopper they can be found here
http://homedistiller.org/forum/viewtopi ... &start=270
along with everything else I did last year.
Now this brings me to the apple chopper Mk IV which I have been working on lately and finally decided to share the details of the build.
I began with the Mk III which had some shortcomings. First and foremost is the plastic bucket I was using it in. This thing was both fun and terrifying to use because even though it was only being spun at 1650 RPM I could never shake the thought of a potential catastrophic blade failure which could send a blade right through the side of a plastic bucket and into one of the people operating the contraption. I found that to be a rather unpleasant thought so I started looking for a suitable tube to put it in. The problem there was the blades on the chopper are a little bigger than 8 inches so an 8 inch tube was too small and a 10 inch tube, much like a bucket, was really too large. The eventual solution came when I found myself with a 32" X 36" sheet of .032 thick stainless steel. With a little thought I figured I could roll that stainless sheet into a 9 inch tube giving the blades a much tighter and more efficient chopping ability.
So that decided I set about making a bottom for the new chopper. I began by making a rough circle a little bit larger than the blades themselves. I didn't use anything to actually measure just got a rough circle by tying two pens together to use as a compass. Then I cut the circle out and cut a piece of stainless out a little larger than the paper circle. My original intention was to cut out a piece of plywood to form the shape out of but didn't have any plywood so I wound up just using a piece of wood. This worked OK but far from perfect. Fortunately I don't need it to be perfect.
Next I I began drilling the tube and bolting it to the tube to make it as tight of a fit as I could. In truth it isn't very tight but it is tight enough.
Once I got it screwed down all the way around I drilled some holes up the side to hold it all together and it looked like this.
Fortunately today I found the time to just about finish the chopper 
I cut it into 2 pieces and used one as a coupling
