The stone mill that is intended to be made is more obviously different from the traditional stone mill, and it can also be said to be a whimsy that comes out of order to take a shortcut and be lazy, and it should be called a mill!

Dozens of meters away from the construction of the house, there is a large stone protruding twenty or thirty centimeters from the ground, which becomes a relatively flat large stone slab after being slightly trimmed with a chisel.

Its material is relatively hard, and it should be able to meet the basic requirement of not shedding chips when rolling corn.

After grinding and leveling, a square groove with a depth of 5 centimeters and a width of 20 centimeters and a length of one meter is cut on it, and the purpose of making it is to put the corn into it and use the grinding disc to roll it back and forth.

Then I found a hard stone in the distant woods and chiseled it into a large round grinding disc with a diameter of 60 centimeters and a thickness of 25 centimeters.

The next step is to officially start construction......

After drawing the size with charcoal, I will dig it directly, and I will try to do what I can now.

Although the high temperature in summer will affect the progress, the high temperature also makes me have nothing else to do, except for the occasional overseas I am basically idle, so it is better to make full use of this free time.

The groove is more troublesome than the stone grinding, and the groove at the bottom to increase friction can be said to be slowly ground out little by little.

Stone grinding is a lot more casual, you only need to ensure a standard round to be done, of course, it is easy to say, but it is also a lot more difficult to do!

At the beginning, the size and shape of the drawing will be directly used with the back of the axe to knock off the extra edges and corners, and finally carry out fine trimming, although the early stage is laborious but not bothersome, every chisel in the later stage must be cautious!

The chisel and axe were alternately used, and the stone grinding disc and the groove underneath took about a week to make it.

And in the process of excavation, we must also be careful, a little more to form a depression is a big defect that determines success or failure!

The following day, it was still not directly put into use, so I used a stone mill to roll back and forth in the groove, so that the direct collision between the stones and the stones would grind off all the small edges and corners inside, so as to prevent small stones and stone powder from falling into the cornmeal when the noodles were officially grinded in the future.

......

Everything is ready, and the next step is to test the results of these eight days, and after cleaning the inside, the first test finally begins!

At this point, I was elated and felt that everything was under control.

Put in about a pound of corn kernels, and then start rolling the big grinding disc non-stop.

However...... After three or five minutes of dozens of rolls, the corn kernels inside are not damaged, but only less than one-tenth of them are damaged to varying degrees!

Reality once again gave me a resounding slap in the face, the results of the experiment can be said to be quite unsuccessful, dozens of times of grinding is just like this, even if the number is increased to a hundred, two hundred, there will be no fundamental change.

I speculate that due to the lack of weight and pressure of the stone mill, the current stone mill made of small and cheap cannot break the corn kernels at all, and a basin of cold water poured down on my head makes me cold from the top of my head to the center of my feet!

It seems that these eight days were almost wasted, and it turned out that this method simply did not work!

Oh God!!

It took me eight days......

A week's hard work came to naught, making people very depressed, and they couldn't wait for a mouthful of old blood to spurt out.

But since the problem has arisen, we can only find a way to solve it, and if we give up halfway, then these eight days will really be wasted, just to verify the feasibility of this method.

Sitting on the stone mill scratching my ears and cheeks for a while, I didn't seem to think of a better solution, I can only say that the initial idea was too naïve, there is a saying called "what you plant, what you get", I now taste the bitter fruit of wanting to pick up cheap!

In the absence of a better remedy, the decision was made to abandon the existing programme and return to the original idea.

Re-do the hand-pushed mill at home when I was a child, of course, this means that a week's hard work is officially put into practice!

......

The first step in building a hand-pushed stone mill is to find the right stone, and the lower part of the stone mill must be made of a relatively large stone.

And at least one meter above the ground but not higher than two meters, the diameter is also preferably about one meter is the most ideal material.

These size requirements excluded most of the stones on the island, and further limited my plans to move closer to the house, so that I could only grind the stones in whichever position I wanted!

There are not many stones of this size on the island, probably only three or four, and none of them are close, even the closest one to me is more than three hundred meters away.

Of course, if I had to choose, it would definitely be from near and far, and no one would want to choose the same choice.

However, the first stone lived up to my expectations, although it was not weathered stone, but its material was too soft to bear the heavy lifting of stone grinding.

Although in my opinion, the softer the stone, the better, because the speed of excavation is faster.

But from the practical point of view, it is the opposite, the harder the stone, the better, when grinding the soft stone will be mixed with a part of the stone powder into the flour to make it inedible, the hard work will be in vain!

The second stone was 400 meters away, and it was much more friendly to me, so hard that it even made people feel stressful.

The distance and diameter are also quite appropriate, but there are some problems with the height, about one meter eight, and seeing this gives me a headache again.

Finally, I went further away to look at the third stone, and found that it was hard enough, but it was larger, and I had to go back to the second stone in comparison.

The rest of the process was full of violence and savagery, and it was also wanton with my sweat, but fortunately this stone did not have to worry about the problem of direct sunlight in the open air in the woods, and if it was in the open air, it would have to wait for a cloudy day or morning and evening.

The beating bit by bit made my left hand wear out several blood blisters, and it took two days to compress the height to about 1.2 meters, and then I was going to take a day off, I was too tired lately, and the continuous tapping of the stone made people tired!

After a day's rest, the work continued, and it was not until four days later that the lower plate of the stone mill was completely completed.

Although it can't be described as a work of art on the surface, it also has a look, and you only need to slowly change the grinding disc on it.

......

Now it seems that the eight days of making the first roll is not a complete waste, at least the finished round grinding disc can still be used, and it can be put into use directly with only a little modification.

The main modification is to drill a three-centimeter-diameter axis in the center of one side, because its rotation must be around the center, and the other is to drill a five-centimeter-diameter feeding hole ten centimeters away from the center.

In addition, the contact surface of the lower plate and the grinding disc will be marked with a line groove to increase friction, without them, the cornmeal is also difficult to grind out, and the method of the ancestors has been borrowed again.

Finally, drill an axis in the center of the lower plate, and drill a hole on the side of the grinding disc to insert the wooden rod that pushes the forward force.

When I was a child, the stone mill at home had a push-pull rod like a hoe, and people stood still and only used the push-pull wooden rod to make the stone mill rotate.

Now I don't want to do it anymore, not only do I not have the right wood, but I also feel tired, so I used the stupid method, I just need to hold on to the pole and keep grinding around

It's like a donkey grinding and pushing noodles in the TV series, hahahaha......

I left it empty for a few hours before grinding it, as I did last time, to let some of the sharpness inside it be ground off so that it wouldn't fall into the cornmeal later.

The next day, I was a little excited and looking forward to the trial again, and the success rate this time was definitely much higher, after all, I didn't think about being lazy this time, but really did it according to the prototype in my memory.

But thinking about the lessons learned since I went to the island, I still feel that it is not appropriate to rejoice too early, and everything can only be known after testing.

After taking out the grinding disc and cleaning the stone chips inside, I closed the grinding disc and grabbed two handfuls of corn and sent them into the feeding hole, and began to circle around the stone mill like a donkey!

At this time, the whole person was very excited, and I felt like I was full of strength.

The stone mill was not too laborious to push except at the beginning, but after the cornmeal came out, I found that it seemed to be a little lighter, and I added a stone weighing about ten pounds to it.

......

Good things are grinding, the cornmeal finally succeeded in slowly squeezing out of the gap, and the excitement of this moment finally solved a big problem!

Grinding is a very patient job, which requires strength and good patience at the same time, and I found that the first time I grinded, the surface was still a little rough, and I poured it in and grinded it for the first time, but the output efficiency was lower.

It took almost four hours to grind a total of about 20 catties of rough noodles, so it seems that in extreme cases, grinding 50 catties of rough noodles a day should not be a big problem!

There is one last hurdle to overcome if you want to eat fine cornmeal, and now the ground flour is relatively rough, and you still need to do a sieve to filter it to achieve a relatively fine flour.

I have to say that the difficulty and trouble of chiseling a stone mill is more of a headache than that of clearing the wasteland and building a house, and it can even be listed as the first difficult project on the island, but this stone mill can be easily used for decades, and the effort is still worth it!

I feel like I'm an all-rounder, and I admire myself a little bit for what I don't need in life.

I never thought I had so much energy before, maybe this is the potential of people to survive!

The net of the sieve is also a mosquito net, and when I picked it up, I didn't expect it to be so useful.

I took a piece of clean mosquito net cloth of about half a square meter, circled it into a circle with teng strips, folded it in half three times, and then tightened the mosquito net.

The large mesh of the mosquito net itself is not suitable for making a sieve, but the current conditions are not so demanding, and most of the granular corn kernels can be stuck in the sieve after being folded in half three times.

I can't wait to sift out the cornmeal, and my mouth waters at the thought of eating delicious tortillas when I was a kid......

It seems that I haven't eaten sweets for too long, and even the temptation of tortillas is starting to be irresistible, and it's still sugar-free tortillas!