Pairodox

Many thanks to all those who participated in our recent Farm Challenge. The winner was my great friend, Anna, from the Hoosier state of Indiana. The runner-up was M. Hazel from Play, stories and photos from the southern Saskatchewan prairie. If you’ve been reading comments to the third post in the challenge series you will have already discovered that the highly functional and somewhat unusual gadget is a 1928 Montgomery Ward’s Royal Blue Junior Cream Separator. The images below show a page from the original owner’s manual, the Royal Blue name plate, the fully assembled machine, and all of its component parts laid out on our kitchen table. We  purchased two gallons of raw Jersey milk this morning at the Toy Cow Creamery and spun it down in less than five minutes. Joanna made a nice batch of Ricotta from the milk and she will process the cream into butter later in the week. Using a cream separator for the first time can be quite an experience. It is essentially a small centrifuge which spins at 8,000 – 10,000 RPM. The base is a very heavy-duty, oil-filled, gear box. To attain the proper rotational speed for this application the operator must turn the hand crank at 65 RPM. Milk flows via gravity to the bottom of the spinning separation chamber and because of its conical shape and ingenious design centrifugal forces drive milk and cream through a series of channels which empty milk into the lower spout (seen in the bottom left image below) and the less-dense cream into the upper spout. We recorded the process and I hope to post that movie file as soon as I can figure out how to do so. Thanks again everyone for all of your interest.