Converting old milking machine into chamber vacuum sealer

Has anybody tried this? I have an older Surge cow milking machine that I used to milk goats. I sold the goats but nobody wanted to buy a large (very heavy) antique milking machine.  I could fit a lot of jars in the bucket (chamber). Do you think those vacuum pumps could be adjusted to work? I think milking is like 14 Hg and chamber vacuum sealers need 29-30 Hg (a little more then the more common type of vacuum sealer which sucks the air out of the bag, etc.) Chamber vacuum sealers are usually much more expensive and could be used with a variety of jars, which is useful, since they create a vacuum in a chamber which causes the jars inside the chamber to seal. Thanks for any suggestions.

That's crazy! And potentially brilliant!

My dairy farm days are in the long, long ago. But I'll bet that the vacuum at the souce of those big old pumps was many times stronger than what Bessie the Cow experienced. There was certainly some sort of regulation along the line, or possibly built into the machine itself, to keep a consistent vacuum as the airflow changed.

Have you tried to search for a manual? There is all sorts of unexpected stuff on the Internet. Including this thread!

My machine hasn't been used for about 5 years. I thought if nobody had a reason why it wouldn't work, then I would ask the Surge dealer if he would try adjusting it for me. Tinkering like that is beyond my comfort zone, and I need to get some oil and new leathers, etc. anyway. When I bought it about 23 years ago, it was running a 4 bucket pipeline, and the Surge dealer converted it to just hook to one bucket for me to milk goats. He said he bought a box of manuals from a Surge dealer who retired and he has a manual for my machine. I think it is from the 1930s...it is a big cast iron vacuum pump.  I haven't looked online recently, but I couldn't find it before. I figure if it could create enough vacuum to milk 4 cows at the same time, then maybe it could become a chamber vacuum sealer.

I just come here to ask the same question.did you ever try it

I wasn't familiar with chamber sealers so I had a look and found this video on how they work:



Looks pretty straightforwards to use with those sort of jars. I wonder how critical the vacuum level is?