Shredding fruits and root vegetables

A rural resident with a large orchard and livestock will surely appreciate the slicer made by craftsman E. Kulikov from the village of Barnukovo in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast. In years with a good apple harvest, it is used to process fruit into juice and wine, and in everyday life it makes preparing feed for domestic animals easier — people in those parts keep quite a lot of them.

The unit is simple, and it is quite easy to build at home, or even in a village workshop. It consists of a welded cylindrical tank mounted on three leg supports made of steel tubes with foot plates. The tank is closed on top with a hinged lid, and a window is cut in its lower part for the finished product to exit. A vertical plate reinforced with gussets is welded to the bottom from below, and a three-phase electric motor rated at 1.1 kW is bolted to it. The motor is connected to the mains using a single-phase scheme.

A clamping washer is fitted on the motor shaft, which passes through a hole in the tank bottom, and the cutting disc is attached to it with four screws. It is cut from a 2 mm steel sheet. Slots measuring 110×20 mm are made on diametrically opposite sides. Their edges facing against the direction of rotation are bent and sharpened to form cutting edges. Two rubber-coated scrapers are riveted to the underside of the disc to feed already sliced root-crop pieces into the discharge pipe.

The receiving tank holds 8—10 kg of apples or potatoes, which the slicer processes in about one minute.

Of course, for product purity it would be better to make such a slicer from food-grade stainless steel and plastic, but these materials are hard to obtain in a village. Therefore the inner and outer surfaces of the tank are carefully painted, and the condition of the coating is monitored closely.

“Modelist-Konstruktor” No. 11–12 ’98, V. KUDRIN