Sunday, June 3, 2012

Pedal Powered Grain Cleaning


My good friend Jeffrey built this incredible human-powered machine to clean his homegrown grain. Check out his video:

pedal powered grain cleaning

2 comments:

Slow Hand Farm said...

That's beautifully built! Now we just need to get him to make the combine to ride through the field, harvest and thresh. He mentioned other bicycle adapted tools, do you know what they are?

Jacob said...

Yes. He's built a bike machine that powers a home-scale flour mill. And he's also built a bike-powered machine that winds strings. He's both a blacksmith and an artist and he builds these very large (maybe 30-40' tall) stringed instrument sculptures. He calls them Aeolian Harps, which make music with the wind. To build the strings, he uses this machine he's built to wind a tight spiral of wire around a center wire core. You can see images of the harps here: http://jeffreyfunkmetalworker.com/skill/aeolian-harps/