Meal Bagging | ||||
This is the area of the mill where the miller would stand to monitor and control the quality of the meal being produced by the Millstones. The two handwheels, one to the left of the flour sack, raise or lower the stone spindle through a series of levers which in turn raises or lowers the runner stone. Lowering the stone spindle and the runner millstone reduces the gap between the two millstones. This will produce a finer quality of meal but great care has be taken to ensure that the two stones can never come into contact with each other. If they do, they could produce stone particles in the meal or even produce sparks that could lead to flour dust explosions. The meal emerging from between the millstones falls down the wooden chutes into the horizontal section where an Archimedes screw conveyer pushes it along to the outlet for collection into sacks. Adjacent to the Meal Bagging area is the semicircular board and control lever for the Penstock. This is used by the miller to control the quantity of water flowing onto the Waterwheel which in turn controls the rotational speed of the runner millstone. A small segment of the pitwheel is visible within the casing. |