Joe in NH:
I helped John Bucklin ( a grandson, or grandson-in-law) to B.F. Clyde with the installation of their Ames steam engine back in 1973 or '74. Clyde's Cider Mill is a Boomer and Boschert Mill. It uses a double-screw press of the heavier design offered by B & B. No toggle action is used- direct acting larger press screws.
In 1973 or 74, Bucklin and his family had decided to convert their cider mill back to steam power. At that point in time, they were using a Model T Ford engine and transmission as a "power unit". This had been installed circa 1914 to replace the original steam engine. Bucklin found an Ames center crank steam engine, perhaps 6" x 8", in an old steam laundry in Rhode Island. He removed that engine and brought it to their cider mill. They obtained a vertical firetube boiler from a defunct creamery, along with a Worthington duplex steam feed pump. The steam plant was put in place, and I helped Bucklin change the direction of rotation of the engine to suit the direction the lineshaft had to turn. I also gave him a relief valve for the feed pump to avoid accidentally "dead heading" the pump.
John Bucklin told me a good deal about the mill and its operation. The mill was built by Boomer & Boschert, and the press frame seemed to be integral with the post-and-beam framing of the mill building as I recall. The mill was originally steam powered, but in 1914 or thereabouts, the people who were then running the mill installed the Model T Ford power unit. This consisted of a Model T engine and transmission, complete with foot pedals for shifting, mounted on a wood skid frame.
Bucklin told me that in the 1950's, he had made a trip to Boomer & Boschert's plant in Syracuse, NY. At that time, he knew B & B was not long for this world. Bucklin wanted to purchase a cider transfer pump from B & B. This was basically a plunger type pump with a crank disc and connecting rod to work the piston. Intake and Discharge valves were nothing more than common screwed bronze swing check valves. As Bucklin told it, B & B did not have a transfer pump in stock, but they did have castings. He watched the oldtimers machine the castings in a lineshaft driven machine shop, and the purchasing agent went up the street to a supply house and got the check valves and pipe nipples. Bucklin also bought all remaining stocks of the copper nails used to nail together the wooden frames used to hold the pomace (grated apple pulp) for pressing. He bought a barrel of copper nails.
Once the steam engine and boiler were installed, Bucklin piped them up using screwed black steel pipe. The Ames engine was in good running condition, and did not need much other than a cleaning. Instead of firing the boiler on coal or wood, Bucklin installed a home oil burner gun and fired it on number 2 fuel oil, with a pressure switch to cut the burner in and out, and a low water cutoff (float) switch. This reduced the amount of labor needed to run the steam plant, as cider making sometimes took everyone on hand.
As the mill was set up, there was a place where trucks backed up and dumped their loads or apples (or the apples were shovelled off or dumped out of bushel baskets). This was a bin which was sloped to feed a conveyor. The conveyor took the apples to the second story of the mill. There, the apples passed along a kind of shaker screen which moved them along and under jets of water to wash the apples. Once washed, the apples went into a bin with a hopper bottom to feed the grater- also lineshaft driven. The grater could be clutched in and out as needed, and discharged into a chute, which dumped onto the press table. The press table was on a swivel, so one side was under the press while a "cheese"- or stack of frames and cloths with the pomace- was being "built", or was being taken apart following pressing.
In full swing, the mill is quite a sight to see. Boomer and Boschert designed the cider mills for real production.
The Fly Creek, NY cider mill is also a Boomer and Boschert mill, and (I believe) uses a John Deere two cylinder (aka "Johnny Popper") power unit to drive the mill.
The "underground" silencers were quite interesting. I first encountered them at an old diesel powerplant out in Missouri in the late 70's. Those silencers were used for some Fairbanks-Morse two-cycle diesel engines producing grid power. As it was explained to me by an old shift operator, the silencers were made by forming and pouring reinforced concrete "boxes". These boxes were rectangular in shape and had pipe sleeves imbedded in the concrete at the inlet and discharge ends. I believe the inlet pipe may have extended into the box and was a perforated steel pipe. The boxes were filled with crushed stone, and a removable slab cover was placed on the box. The discharge or exhaust stack was connected with an elbow to the pipe sleeve in the box, and the stack went up above the roof elevation of the plant. The boxes were buried in the ground. The reason for the removable cover slab was to allow cleaning of the "muffling media"- the gravel would get loaded with carbon soot and oil.
The underground/gravel mufflers were quite effective, and would likely qualify as "super critical silencers". The underground gravel mufflers were quite common in the 'teens and 'twenties for stationary engines. Properly sized, a gravel muffler likely did not have too much back pressure for the silencing it provided.
At the cider mill using the F-M gasoline engine, the muffler is something similar. No one is entirely sure what exactly they have for a muffler as it was put in place over 90 years ago. The belief is the muffler is some kind of containment filled with gravel, and the exhaust stack comes up above grade and extends to some height.
Similarly, the gasoline tank for the F-M engine is also buried. No one knows the exact size of the tank, but they put gasoline in it and the engine's fuel pump picks it up. The engine is probably 20 HP or thereabouts. It sits in a concrete pit in a part of the cider mill/sawmill building that is a single-story appendage, like a milk house on a dairy barn. The F-M engine has a large flywheel, and it is started by stomping down on the flywheel spokes since the engine is in a pit below floor elevation.
