Walnut "Cracker-Huller"

Walnut "Cracker-Huller" FARM HOME Food 32-6-34 Allen Riggs, Hill City, Kansas, built this powered walnut cracker and huller mostly from scrap material. The machine mounts on a piece of shelving. It's powered by a 150 rpm electric motor that belt-drives a 50:1 gear reduction drive. It drives a pair of rollers, cut from a truck driveshaft, at 3 rpm's. Each roller has four cracking stages and is equipped with bolts that can be adjusted according to the size of the walnuts. The speed of the rollers is synchronized by two matching timing gears from cars. Because the rollers rotate at only 3 rpm's, they slowly and gently crack the walnuts, with the meat falling into a stainless steel try salvaged from a restaurant buffet line. A large expanded metal drum serves as a walnut huller. As the walnuts tumble inside the drum, the hulls fall through the expanded metal to the ground while the walnuts remain inside. "I put two 5-gal. buckets of walnuts in the drum, and add a block of wood about the size of a 1-gal. bucket that rolls and tumbles with the walnuts. While I'm cracking one batch of walnuts, another batch is being hulled," says Riggs. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Allen L. Riggs, 222 S. East St., Hill City, Kansas 67642.

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