Giant Wheel Grinds Charcoal! (Yes, it works..!) 

Its like having your own industrial revolution

By having a large hopper of charcoal above the grinder, the weight of the charcoal would push itself through the grinder. I'm also surprised you didn't go for a cylindrical grinder, but I'm guessing that was more a manufacturing limitation more than anything.

When you get to it, you should consider adding grease fittings at all of the sliding joints, just to reduce wear.

Very well done! This really does look incredible all up and running. Anyone who didn't follow you would have no idea of the number of hurdles overcome to get this far. These things always look straightforward at the end and generally people look, give a knowing nod, and think 'yes, I can see how that works.' In their mind that's pretty much the same thing as 'I could have come up with that'. The truth is that it takes a special blend of lateral thought, technical instinct and shear tenacity to get these things up and running. Plus you're turning the whole experience into enjoyable and interesting films as well!

An idea you could use to increase the amount of charcoal grated is to add a second blade to cut on the back stroke. Still great to see everything working so smoothly !

"The clutch rattling like a busy hamster." Poetry as well as machinery that is beautifully satisfying to watch - it's a triumph of invention!

'hypnotizing' is a really good word for it.

The huge wheel is a marvel of ingenuity. The charcoal cutter is a problem that your tenacity and ingenuity will overcome.

Well Done. Congratulations on the success of your build. So much construction and figurring.

Trial and error made the world what it is today, keep plugging along your journey is amazing!

Wonderful!!! One word of caution if I may: a fairly dangerous moment in flywheel / belt operation is when the wheel has _nearly_ stopped. The urge to just grab something with your hands is large because it seems like there is hardly any speed left. However, the momentum of the wheel is easily still large enough to inflict very ugly damage. Please take care of your hands, we want to watch them doing wonderful and weird things for many more years to come 😍

It looks like your blade tray is long enough accommodate at least one or two more blades and a longer hopper, without needing any additional stroke. You certainly have the engine power to handle more blades cutting at once. You might be able to have blades facing both directions as well, so that it cuts on both forward and return stroke.

Tim, you are a magnificently entertaining bodger. Roll on the next episodes.

you and Will are certainly a clever bunch of fellows ... Nice Done Sir's ... Nicely Done

Now that machine deserves a nice coat of Brunswick green!

very splendid indeed. you could increase the stroke relatively simply by splitting the con rod and adding a vertical lever, pivoted at the floor. the eccentric drives the middle (ish) of this lever, and the top of the lever connects to the reciprocating blade carrier. You can tune the cutter stroke by adjusting the relative positions of the con rod(s) on the vertical lever. easier if i could draw it, but then you probably thought of it already

Incredible, Tim - I think a giant sheet metal hopper is in order for you to fill up your machine for the day. One day you can build a gasifier unit to power your engine with the gasses produced by burning the same charcoal

I'm surprised i caught this upload so early, your videos are such fun to watch.

After this channel for quite a while I am amazed at what Tim and his pals can come up with. It seems that home workshops with very little fancy and heavy duty equipment can make extremely workable and simple machinery. These types of channels are far more interesting than most videos from over equipped shops. Keep up the designing and building of your farm machinery.

Great to see it all working out.

Yay! It’s the big moment! Thanks for publishing!

So you can use it for slicing wood and for grinding charcoal, sounds like a winner! Been binging on your videos and am getting ideas. Ideas that are scaring my wife! LOL

Amazing ingenuity. Thoroughly enjoying your workmanship and looking forward to your loco hauling wagons around. Regards to Sandra and the main man Will. 🇬🇧

I love it when a plan comes together..🤗

Man I love seeing your stuff pop up in my feed, that grinder is a sight to behold!

If you want to increase stroke you can add a lever between the main push rod and the grinder. Mounting the push rod near pivot of the lever and then mounting other pushrod to grinder near end of lever will allow you to double or quadruple stroke without having to change that beautiful eccentric you made.

What a marvel! Watching your creative madness has been such a delight. Definitely sharing!

I instincively backed away to one side when you approached the flywheel with the camera Tim! That thing is scary!

Keep the same stroke, but add another hopper and blade in tandem with the first one. Hey presto, instant doubling of output!

Fabulous! And we were allowed to witness the whole process - very inspiring! 🤠

I'd say it works great, it's nice to watch and love the sound of the ole grinder and engine working!

What an achievement Tim we marvel at you.Have a wonderful Sunday.GodBless.We would love to be in Ireland 🇮🇪.☘️☘️☘️🍀🍀🍀🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺🇪🇺

Rube Goldberg would be so proud! Beautiful!!

I'm so happy so finally see it all come together. Thank you Tim to take us all with you on your journeys. A very simple suggestion for a more efficient grinding operation: Tilt the currently vertical plates in the direction from which the blase is coming from. Then the coal can't be pushed up by the blade. (at least not as easily).

That’s a wonderful machine! I say leave as is and just add a massive hopper and let it run. It’s a nice slow safe controlled process. So glad you added the shear bolt! That will save your fine machine in the event of a jam. You may want to add some grease cups or oilers to your pivots and slides so they can keep stuff lubricated. And adding conveyor to move cut charcoal to a rail hopper would be awesome and another conveyor to dump charcoal into the grinding hopper! Haha!

getting really close to production ready! exciting!

when they do this sort of thing even in modern times, Not saying charcoal but other materials like it. You make a big top gathering hopper and you fill it up. bigger and taller you go the more force is is applied to the materials being ground up below. Not really sure how heavy charcoal is. But the other method for lighter materials is a screw feed and it forces the materials into the grinding section. simple hole auger inside a pipe would work. Hey gives you more parts to fling around watch on this thing anyhow LOL Very nicely done! Love the project!

What a bloody brilliant contraption!!! Bravo. 🙂

Well by George, you have achieved the Industrial Revolution Stage! Like others, I say add a spring loaded top on the hopper to keep constant down pressure. How about built a second chopper/hopper on the table? Or a second table to sit next to the first, run them both with a yoke off the drive rod.

Wow! Wonderful to see how everything works and then also error -free! It's good that you have installed a target breakage! That you have to make a few more improvements is actually a matter of course, since this is actually the case with everything. But I am certainly with your wealth of ideas and your enthusiasm you will quickly get the problem solved.

Wow Tim, it's coming along so nicely. All your testing has really paid off with this smooth running:)

Great progress, Tim - impressive action! As others have said, arrange the blade so it cuts on both strokes and is thinner (or multiples thereof), a hopper above, and a chute/guide below, as well as adding a multiplying arm between the wheel & crusher. Anyhow, proof of concept works! Ignore some of the nay-sayers, they obviously haven't been following along...

Mug of tea and Way Out West 👍 one of the best channels on RU-vid, well done guys.👏

Fantastic, simply fantastic

This is getting better every time! What you need now is a turntable and some mobile track sections that you can clip in place to where you need a truck to go and then you can remove the track when you are done. I noticed a comment about a cylindrical grinder and a bucket chain would enable you to fill the hopper from a belt on the flywheel. The buckets are lifted, then tilted over when the bucket reaches a certain point to empty the contents into a hopper before returning to ground level to be refilled. When you have a load ready, you pull a rope to engage the pulley and the bucket is lifted up and emptied, then you let go of the rope when you wish to load the next load.

one possible way to increase the stroke would be to have your con rod now pushing on a vertically placed arm that pivots at the bottom, and as long as a second con rod is attached to the same arm farther from the pivot youll get increased stroke

Really made my Sunday morning when I saw you release this video! Super impressive setup and following for your journey for a long time now and it's so great to see your plans become reality. Fred Dibnah would be proud of that setup!

Good day, Wow, Fantastic, oh my, This is very cool. Gives me many ideas. Fantastic video

I've been so excited to see the wheel in action!

Reminds me of helping on the farm in the ‘40s at harvest time when the thresher came round.

Amazing, as usual. It was quite a relief to hear mechanic-wiz Wil ask whether “the red button” was the one to touch for filming. 😂

Well done, sir!!

Thanks Tim

Very interesting build, glad to see the reemergence of old ideas! Instead of extending the stroke you could very easily triple your output by adding two additional hoppers and blades in line with your existing one. Combined with playing around with the angle of the blade and blade gap I think you could get a satisfactory result without painstakingly rebuilding your eccentric. You could even build another table in line or extend your current table and connect another blade plate. you might run into the problem of shearing your shaft shear pin under normal operation with the increased drag of multiple cutting surfaces but the rest shouldn't even notice the extra load.

I look forward to these videos most of all

Absolutely fantastic!! I’m tickled shitless for you guys, to see all the hard work and problem solving coming together!

What a neat video. Good job, guys.

Blown away Tim. Top job. xx

Well done Tim!

This is so satisfying to watch!

Well done, glad to see it running

Brilliant job! You could probably crush stone in that thing it’s so powerful!

Well done, Tim. It's purring along like a Rolls Royce now you've tweaked it. Deeper hoppers maybe?

Absolutely brilliant. Heath-Robinson would be supremely jealous of such a magnificent machine.

"I love it when a plan comes together..." Well done - good to hear the excitement in your voice when each of the components you've made are working in harmony. Next week: 'The Big Hopper'...?

The white coat men can't be far away ! 🤣👍🏻

You have the basics, now the fine tuning. Runs very sweetly too, well done indeed.

So glad it's showing great potential bro. Safe travels.

That wheel is art!

A large hopper that comes to a choke point would allow you to apply a rather large amount of equal pressure that remains nearly the entirety the volume of the hopper, simply with the charcoals weight itself. No extra pressure. As well as finding the optimal blade angle point, a large hopper would allow you to load a large amount of charcoal and leave it to work without constant fiddling.

Wonderful proof of concept

Genius, as usual Tim. I think with a large enough hopper the weight of the wet charcoal will speed things up quite a bit. Of course increasing the stroke will as well, but that's a lot more work. Fantastic seeing the momentum wheel spinning happily.

Hi great stuff , don't forget to lubricate the unique machine, take care of it and it wil serve you well. Many thanks from Nr Liverpool.

I agree a hopper would help provide the compression on the material being ground. To increase the stroke the connecting rod could be used to drive a arm/lever, hinged at one end, connecting rod to the middle and drive to the grater from the other end. Alternately, connecting rod to an end, pivot point off centre (40/60) and the grater driven off the other end. Would your wheelbarrow slide under the frame and save all the messing about and lifting of the fish boxes?

It is absolutely wonderful to see this, having followed this saga for many months now. It very much feels like you are on the cusp of greatness. I still don't know what the proper name for the eccentric cam thingamy is, but seeing it in action shows just how genius an idea they are. :)

This is how industrial machinery should be. No computer controls, just giant wheels, flat belts, reciprocating slides, things like that. Now for a dog to disconnect the clutch when the fish box is heavy enough to be full.

Great potential for shaking and sifting soils, rock and so on. Once the chopping is done, of course! Excellent work!

Its a complete success tho! gonna be such fun all the things you'll make for her to work chap

Bravo! Fabulous result!

the eccentric rod on the willie looks very good.

The brilliant part about this design is that the engine is merely there to build up the momentum and keep it there. I have a sneaking suspicion that with the current setup, the configuration could easily run 3-4 of those slicers without issue.

Hurrah! Thank-you!

Fantastic, Tim & Will! Well done! Please remember to grease any pivot points!

gotta say been following you for a little while now. Seeing everything develop seeing your solutions and what you come up with. On your own or input from other people it's just amazing to watch. Takes also so much inspiration of the older machinery you have and i just love it. Your videos are the thing for me when i wanna wind down or need rest. Well done. Love your solutions and builds.

You could extend the stroke at the machine by making a mid way mechanism between machine and wheel. This could work by splitting the con arm in two and atatching both ends to a swinging arm. BUT, with the wheel attatched lower down on the swinging arm than the rod that drives the machine. This would both extend the stroke of the machine, and increase it's speed. and by moving the atatchement point up or down, you could adjust the range of movement it produces.

Awesome, now you just need a conveyor belt underneath and a rail bridge over top to dump carloads of charcoal in.

Brilliant Tim. What a great bit of kit you have built. No matter what, that wheel and eccentric are wonderful to watch. Once you have it sorted you need to write up a greasing and oiling schedule for all the moving parts so nothing "runs" dry.....Great video.

Beautiful to behold.

I like how this guy speaks.

I love the fun contraptions you have created (some may say very Heath Robinson) and your eye for detail makes these things elegant designs. I don't know if anyone else has suggested this but may be angling your separator plates so that as the cutting blade moves forward the charcoal lumps are pushing against an inclined surface which will tend to push the material against the blade. This may work in the same way as trying to push down on the feed material. Adding a hopper that doesn't have the feed material bind up and block the feeding may be tricky - it's amazing what you can prototype with sticky tape, hot melt glue and corrugated cardboard (may require some paint to provide some water resistance as the charcoal feed material looks very wet!)

Thats awesome, I know the charcoal is intended to be an admixture, but it looks like it would burn very hot.

Suggestion Cut the shear bolt half way through where it "experiences " the most force or use a material that is softer than steel. Or seriously bad stuff can happen. Good luck from Canada.8

A tilted plate or shute under the cutter so the charcoal slides down to a bucket, box, or other container outside of the machine frame is possible. It could even have a movable vane to switch catch containers during a run without losing or spilling any product.

Well built machinery really is a thing of beauty.

Loving these videos. Amazing projects!

looking forward to seeing the next step in the process

Well done 👍👍👍. Thank you for sharing. Be safe 🇨🇦

Very nicely done. I tend to over design and over build everything I make and what you did was simple and well thought out. I like The eccentric on the Main flywheel, that was really nice piece of engineering. I really enjoy watching what you do. Hopefully I can start doing stuff myself again and I'm looking forward to it. It's not so much the years for me it's miles or kilometers if you prefer on my body! Thanks, Bob from Virginia USA

How good is that Tim! A beautiful thing indeed....how about increasing the thickness of the blade so the charcoal drops into a deeper recess. Might work....easy for me to sit in my armchair and make comments like this!...Keep up the good work.

may be a few more cutting edges on the same moving plate ? Very pleasant success to date, of course.