Has anybody used the Davebilt nutcracker? When my trees are all producing, I'll have MO native pecans, improved northern pecan varieties, native hazels, named varieties of hazels, carpathian walnuts and chinkapin chestnuts. Any chance it'll work for all of these? Is there a better nutcracker?

Thanks!

I can't answer your question but maybe I can offer some more info.
I found these guys in Holland making nutcrackers. The site is multi lingual and they ship all over the world.
I found a lot of nice and useful info on pressing oils and cracking nuts, especially time and yield info.

I haven't used one, so this is not a personal recommendation.

https://www.piteba.com/index.html

Thanks Russ. That's an interesting design. Seems like it'd be a lot slower than the Davebilt, but it is a lot cheaper.

Sorry, I can't answer your question about the Dave built either but I do crack a lot of nuts and did research on crackers. I found most of the small batch type home scale crackers similar to that cracker were too slow of capacity for even personnel use so I made my own instead.

Ray, do you have your own machine shop or did you convert something else into a cracker?

I know some people use it for walnuts, but it wouldn't be my choice. It works for hazelnuts and chestnuts, it won't work for black walnut or hickory.

Think it'd word on the little native hazels? They're barely worth cracking one at a time. If it'd work good on those and the improved hazels and at least work on pecans somewhat, I'd probably buy it.  English walnuts aren't bad to shell one at a time.

Only the native hazels are producing so far. Well, I'm going to get about ten Lake English Walnuts. I got only one the year before last. None last year. It's a young tree. It's amazing how much better they taste than the ones you buy in the store.

Yes, it should work with little hazelnuts. The Davebilt it adjustable by removing or adding washers. It's nice if the nuts you are using are all similar in size.

Ken W Wilson wrote:Ray, do you have your own machine shop or did you convert something else into a cracker?

I have my own farm shop so I made one from scratch kind of based on a design that a guy has a YouTube video of where he's building one it looks like for English walnuts, mine is alot bigger and heavier duty .  I bought a drill cracker a few years back it's a lot like the Davebilt cracker except you put a power drill hooked up to it for power and it works at First for the initial cracking but when you run it through a second time the nuts don't feed well. If you want to see my cracker go to YouTube and type in rays black walnut cracker. My dad came over and made a video of my set up. To me the other major factor is sorting nut meats so I built a separator table that my cracker dumps into. I still need a further sorting method so if anyone has some ideas I am all ears. Some guys I know are thinking of using carding cloth to pierce the meats for further separation.

I ordered it. I'll give a report after I try it. I don't expect to have more than a couple pounds of nuts this year. I should have lots in a few years.

I'll check out your video.

I saw a show about cashew production, it might have been Anthony Bourfain's. They were using a sharpened piece of wire to poke and lift the nut pieces. Might not work on walnuts, but it wouldn't be hard to try it out on the bigger pieces

Awesome machine! You should market it. The nut pieces are small to hand sort. I wonder how they do it at Hammons Black Walnuts. They're 45 minutes from here. Wish I new someone that worked there.

Ken W Wilson wrote:Awesome machine! You should market it. The nut pieces are small to hand sort. I wonder how they do it at Hammons Black Walnuts. They're 45 minutes from here. Wish I new someone that worked there.

No at that point it is pretty easy to hand sort as the separator table does over half the work already. A guy I know went Hammons for a tour and said at one stage they use a infrared eye that guides a air nozzle to blow pieces of shell out of the mix. I heard their cracking machine is hidden from public view but they do give tours. I'm sure Hammons spent lots of money on a team of engineers to design the system.

I'm sure it will work good for that. Hazels and acorns go easy, that is why companies love to demonstrate cracking those. At any rate, the Davebilt is cheap. The drill cracker was $450.00. At our Michigan nut growers summer picnic there was a master cracker nut cracker and that by far is the best single stage cracker I have used, we were cracking hickory and English walnuts. Every hickory came out in whole halves.

That's a nice machine! I'm going to embed the youtube video here if you don't mind

thanks for posting the video Russ