Making my apple shredder electric

[Grad]

I just bought an apple shredder, it's the maximizer brand from pleasant hill grain, it's the same thing as the Weston grinder as far as I know but it has a heavier wheel. I'm just wondering if anyone could give some advice on which type/speed/strength of motor to add to it to make it shred apples without the wheel. I only plan on shredding between 2-8 bushels at a time but I obviously don't want it to overheat, and I also don't want it to be too fast or slow to properly shred them. I don't know anything about motors so any advice is appreciated.
Thanks!

 

[Silver79]

I just bought an apple shredder, it's the maximizer brand from pleasant hill grain, it's the same thing as the Weston grinder as far as I know but it has a heavier wheel. I'm just wondering if anyone could give some advice on which type/speed/strength of motor to add to it to make it shred apples without the wheel. I only plan on shredding between 2-8 bushels at a time but I obviously don't want it to overheat, and I also don't want it to be too fast or slow to properly shred them. I don't know anything about motors so any advice is appreciated.
Thanks!

I used a 1/3 h.p. electric motor with a 3 stepped pulley. I replaced the handle wheel on my grinder with a 14" pulley. I made my 14"pulley on a lathe but they are available at most farm stores.
To calculate the desired rpm, I counted the hand driven rpm, looked on the motor to find its rated rpm and then used a pulley calculator to determine the needed sizes. Good luck! Keep us posted.

 

[Chalkyt]

We use different voltage and frequency here in Oz but the principles are the same, just the speeds will be slightly different for AC motors (50Hz vs 60Hz).

There was a bit of a discussion on speeds back in July, but the general opinion was that about 5-10 RPM
is what you should aim for. The problem here is that the commonly available cheap AC motors (i.e. ex washing machine or something like that) are usually around 1500 RPM but you can find them down to 750 RPM, so the pully ratio needed to get down to this speed is a bit ridiculous (little pully on the motor and big pully on the grinder). Mind you, with a big reduction ratio, you don't need a lot of power in the motor since the power at the grinder goes up by the same ratio.

So, you will probably need to find a reduction gearbox, or a motor speed controller, or a more expensive DC motor which can have its speed controlled without losing torque (turning power).

If it was easy and cheap we would all be doing it. I find I can hand grind enough apples for a gallon in about 10 minutes so it isn't a big deal for me as I only do batches of this size. Good luck.

 

[Grad]

5-10 rpm? Isn't that really slow? Do you mean 50-100 possibly? Thanks guys for the input. I plan on doing 5-10 gallons at a time of pressing so that's why I want the motor on it. I haven't actually used the grinder yet(manually) but I figured it might be a bit difficult to use it by myself while dumping apples in.

 

[Chalkyt]

Yes, some zeros seem to have got lost... Sorry! I did write 5-10 in an earlier post and simply copied that without putting my brain into gear. I was thinking more like 5-10 per second.

Jolicoeur talks about 600-900 RPM which is more or less about the same. Too fast and the apples jump all over the place.