Water - Watermill Blog
25th & 27th August 2009

After last week's master class into flour milling we have begun to wonder about our water supply. Flour milling uses more than we had imagined and our pool is quite small and getting smaller as it silts up.

Some of the silting problem will have been reduced by the Court House team who have diverted the stream into the old top pool so that it flows down the cascade again.

The main pool was cleared early in 2007 but then almost filled with debris from the July flooding in the same year. Silt has continued to accumulate ever since, reducing the surface area of the pool by many square feet. It is a job that will have to be tackled but not one we are looking forward to.

Another job that we need to learn how to do that will help with the pool problem is stone dressing. The millstones need be dressed to make them more efficient. This means cutting grooves in the surface of the stones in a pattern. These grooves then act as shears, chopping the grain into smaller pieces rather than just crushing it. Stone dressing  is a skilled job, but we will have to master it.

Work has continued this week on the renovation of the Bamfords rolling mill. The hopper and feed mechanism have been dismantled and a team has been cleaning each part and then painting it with primer and pale blue paint.

The paint colour was chosen to be a close match for the existing finish but has proved to be a bit paler than the original. Hopefully it will weather darker with time (and grime).

We took a lot of pictures of each assembly before we took it apart so we should be able to fit everything back  together when the time comes.

A fair amount of work was also put in to getting the little treadle operated lathe working. Richard and Jim were trying to use it to turn a new roller for the downstream horse and as each problem was solved another would manifest. Work on the roller was slow but the understanding of how the lathe was constructed improved by leaps and bounds. 

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