Walnuts as engine cleaner.

[sime42]

 

Has anyone heard of this practice before?

It's fair blown me away, can't quite get my head around it

 

 

[GarethM]

Yes, you need to also put it into context that the alternative was grit or steel and engines aren't going to like that.

 

Walnut was a waste product too, so win win when your imports into the UK were restricted by u boats etc.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if they also used acorns and similar hardwood to achieve the same.

[peds]

Blimey, that's incredible. Does it have any domestic applications? Should I be chucking acorns into my T5 occasionally? 

[GarethM]

I know a machinist guy that repairs flour equipment for mills and bakeries, for a natural product flour is like pumping sand and eats all metal for fun.

 

They do have magnets to remove the metal but yeah, I don't buy mass production bread.

[peds]

Crikey. Should there be efforts made to switch back to stone querns? Presumably the tiny bits of stone, ignoring the obvious damage to your teeth, are healthier than the various metal dusts?

[GarethM]

6 minutes ago, peds said:

Crikey. Should there be efforts made to switch back to stone querns? Presumably the tiny bits of stone, ignoring the obvious damage to your teeth, are healthier than the various metal dusts?

It's effectively microscopic so it's ok, it's similar to drinking water the levels of sand is very tiny.

[peds]

Not sure if microscopy is relevant depending on the metal, but I wouldn't have a clue what metals the wheat abrasive might encounter in a mill. The rollers would invariably be stainless steel I imagine, but who knows what else there'd be in the bowels of the machine. 

 

I do know, though, that anything I've ever made with a bag of stone-ground flour from the gift shop of a working windmill or watermill has had a certain quality to it that I've never been able to place.

[oldwoodcutter]

That takes me back a bit, some of the raf lads up at Marham were detailed to blast walnut shells through the jet planes for their entire shift.

It was a job they hated and looked upon it as punishment meted out by some vindictive officer.

[roys]

We had to get our jet turbine generators (Rolls Royce RB211) water washed after so many hours of use, however if this was required when ambient was below 5 deg C they would wash it using walnut shells to mitigate against the damage caused by freezing.

[Stere]

 

 

Im sure I remember Alice Roberts on telly on about stone ground flour  wearing teeth down

 

Quote

And yet many teeth were worn down by medieval bread.  Starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,  most grain was ground by big millstones, powered either by wind or water.  These replaced the old hand mills, something closer to a mortar and pestle.

It would take one person essentially all day, doing nothing else, to grind enough grain into flour in a hand mill to make enough bread for a family for one day.  Back in Roman times, a slave or two would do the grinding.  With wind mills and water mills, however, unknown to the Romans, one could grind a 50-pound bag of wheat into a 50-pound bag of flour in fifteen minutes.  Not surprisingly, this technology spread very rapidly and was adopted nearly everywhere.

But mills grind grain by rotating two big millstones against each other, with the grain in between, and what emerges is both flour and stone dust.  The stone dust would be baked into bread along with the flour.  Stone dust passes through the digestive tract without any problem, but it first wears down the teeth, not a lot with each bite, but the effect builds up over time.

Archaeologists can tell when a particular community adopted mills and millstones by looking for wear on skeletons' teeth.

 

Made me wonder about the flour the local windmill sells?

 

Quote

Llynnon Mill is the only working windmill in Wales producing stoneground wholemeal flour using organic wheat. Visit the Iron Age Roundhouses and the reconstructed Old Bakery and then take a stroll along the Mills Trail.