Oat and Almond Milk maker, all in one
Description
Plant-based milk is overpriced, and the typical method to make it at home is to blend your ingredients and strain it through a cloth. This has quite a few steps and clean-up. A royal pain. I came across this product which is made just for this kind of thing: https://almondcow.co/products/almond-cow-milk-machine Only problem is it costs $200 and is patent pending, ouch. But fear not if you have a 3d printer. This product is essentially a food processor with an internal strainer basket. Put ingredients in the basket and water around it and you have an all-in-one plant milk maker. Not hard to reverse engineer. First step was acquire a motor and blade. I found an old food processer kit on Facebook locally. It's discontinued but plentiful on eBay. Ninja model 3181976. https://fooproces.com/3181976 I ended up using the motor from the casing and the short blade in the kit. I cut the input shaft even shorter to make it more compact in the basket. Even better, it's a simple universal motor with no speed control so I could replace the switch with my own super easy, didn't even have to solder. The next step was the mesh screen. I settled on a #40 mesh sheet from Amazon, 8x11in. The openings are about half the area of a typical kitchen strainer. I could have gone with a #80 as the holes were larger than I anticipated but it still produces much smoother milk than straining with a cheesecloth. I sewed the mesh together to form a cylinder, using a strand of the mesh as thread, I think that's pretty clever. The most inaccessible part of this for the average person is the machined parts. I made 4 threaded posts to hold the basket, and a center pin to guide the blade out of stainless steel in my school's machine shop. Let's just say in 1000 years these parts will still be around, totally overengineered for the forces involved but they were fun to make. Using my handy Husky calipers I measured the parts, modeled them, then built everything around that. The mesh on the basket is bent out and sandwiched between the top and bottom plates, with a thin flange with a ring of screws around it. The basket mounts to the motor casing using a friction-twist-wedge system (technical term). Even in the event of the basket coming loose while blending, it rests within 1mm on the lip inside the aluminum pot, and the blade would remain constrained, preventing catastrophe. Total material cost was $50, and could be less for you if you are a shrewd craigslist negotiator. All parts are printed in Overture pink PETG. Cleaning remains to be seen if it will be a problem, but hasn't been too bad so far. Most hardware is M3 and a few M4. Rods were threaded to #8-32. I can provide drawings for lathe parts if requested. The file names are kinda garbage, you'll figure it out.
Statistics
Likes
1
Downloads
0