Minimum Length And Diameter For Crushers

There is a pretty wide variety of sugar cane crushers/juicers/squeezers "out there" already. One manual stainless version was priced < US$ 600, which may be less than the cost of a one-off custom design. There was also a green-painted non-stainless unit with exposed gears, no price given but probably way < $600.

So far as I could see, the rollers seemed to be grooved or knurled for grip on the canes. If a 1-inch diameter cane is squeezed to 1/16 inch thick, it will spread out a bit wider than 3 inches; allowing for larger canes or off-center feeding, the roller length might want to be 5 or 6 inches.

If the roller diameter is too small, it will be hard for them to nip the canes and pull them in without manual pushing. From looking at various pix with no dimensions, I would guess that diameters ranged from around 3 to 5 inches, but with low confidence in precision. Where visible, shaft extensions appeared to be about 1/4 of roller diameter.

Correction: If 1/4" thick after squeezing, it would be ~π" wide (3.14); if 1/8" thick, ~2π" wide (6.28); if 1/16" thick, ~4π wide (12.57).

The diameter of a roller is like a circumference and a contact surface for the cane.the contact to the cane will be the same regardless of the dia. How can dia effect the crushing power?