Low Cost Poultry Feed Pelleting Machine

This may help. Instead of feeding a fire you will be feeding birds. It's alright to use someone else's patent if it's for your own personal use.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/5151000.html

Dear Kramarat, Thank You for responding. Actually I don't know what is wood pellet. In our country wood pellet is not used for generation of heat. Poultry feed ingredients like crushed corn, soybean oil cake (known as soybean meal), rice polishing etc. are mixed together & passed through a cylinder like structure under heavy pressure. On the other side of the cylinder a thick perforated plate is placed. Perforation is made by drilling the plate. Pore size is generally 2-4 mm in diameter. This plate is known as die. The feed mixer under pressure comes out from the die & is cut in 3-5 mm in length & later dried. These feed particles (2-4 mm in diameter & 4-6 mm in Length) are known as pellet feed. When pellets are not made the mixer is known as mash feed. Pelleting machines are used by feed mills & they are costly. I want to make at a low cost, so I sought help. Thank you again. Anwar

What we are telling you is that pellets made from wood and from grain can be made in similar machines. The mash is softer than wood, but the wood machines are similar to the process you describe for the mash. In that link I posted and the patent link will be ways to make your own wood pallet machine that you can adapt to make mash pellets.

Actually, I misunderstood. I thought he already had the pellets and needed an automatic feeder to get them to the birds.

I worked the machines for 3 years in Ireland (more than 20 years ago). In that time, Simon Barron from England supplied the best dies. At least 2 small companies started in Ireland supplying cheaper dies that worked pretty good too.

I guess your die has to be a ring of steel and the inside of the die has to be heat treated after the holes are drilled. And your rolls (2 rollers) to press the meal out have to be heat treated on the surface after being made too. In my time there were rollers with holes drilled a few mm in and alternatively with groves cut (at right angles to the way they rotated on the surface). The ones with holes drilled were better. The insides of the rolls are expensive and replaced rarely. the outside "rim" is the part with the heat treatment that gets most of the wear.

Maybe a local machine shop can make them? With the basic specifications?

Treatment of the die in use is important. Add water or steam to your meal about 2 minutes before it goes through the die. (Steam is better because it cooks the particles a bit but if you do not have steam, water helps greatly with lubrication. (But it must be a fine spray or you will tend to get chokes. You will find the right percentage of fat or oil by experimentation. Grass meal tends to make the die "choke" badly so you have to be careful with it. There are different forms of "calcined magnicite" Which contains calcium and magnesium.

You may find that one form causes "chokes" while another causes the product or pellets to go must faster through the die! I think the good one is formed by a chemical reaction.

I wonder if there is another way to do it cheaper? Maybe 2 wheels coming together and the hot meal gets crushed and compressed between them? You would not get perfect pellets but half the reason for making the pellets is the improvement in palatability from "cooking" the meal just before and as it passes through the pellet mill. I hope that helps.

Brian

I don't know anything about bird farming. Does the feed have to be pelletized? I was thinking, why not just roll it out on drying trays and once it's dry just crush it into small pieces. Probably a good reason not to, but it would be cheap.

I think you have a point. But the quick cooking with steam and the pressure increase as it passes through the machine increases palatability (The starch particles puff up, etc) and kills off some nasties. (The pellets heat up a lot as they pass through the holes too). Sometimes you have to wear gloves or they burn. (Then the pellets generally have to go through an air cooling process). I think it would be very difficult to cool globs of meal after it got cooked!

So maybe if the steamed meal goes through something like a grain roller, you will get some of the benefit? A grain roller is just 2 metal wheels instead of (usually 3) with the die set up. It would be way simpler. Actually there is a flat plate die setup too but I never used it. (A flat plate with holes in it and 1,2 or 3 rollers going in circles on top of it to push the pellets through). The ring system was used pretty much everywhere for some reason. Seems to me that something like the flat plate system or the grain roller (With groves to make pretend pellets) would be a cheaper alternative.

http://www.google.ca/#hl=en&expIds=17259,17311,26788,27404,27584,27601&xhr=t&q=%22wood+pellets%22+%2Bmake&cp=19&pf=p&sclient=psy&aq=f&aqi=g4g-o1&aql=&oq=%22wood+pellets%22+%2Bmak&gs_rfai=&pbx=1&fp=935c2c1965a84845

http://www.google.is/search?q=homemade+grass+pellets+machine&hl=is&sa=X&prmd=v&source=univ&tbs=vid:1&tbo=u&ei=EX7hTPOmCcnT4gbS9LCFBQ&oi=video_result_group&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CCgQqwQwAA

A meat grinder of the type for making sausage might work for this, if combined with a rotary knife to cut the extruded strands to length. They are available in small manual or motorized versions.

Dear Mr. Syed Anwaar,
My cousin Dr.Syed Waheed Hussain Shah is a Animal Husbandry doctor and a partner in SHAHNAWAZ feed company in Pakistan. You may contact him and get a proper answer to your question. Please go to web site and brouse sahahnawaz feed, then find the contact number of Dr. Waheed Hussain Shah. Adress him your question with my reference.
Thanks
Syed Tahir Ali Abbasi Ul Hashmi