I read John’s announcement below of what to me is a bit of a marvel and commented to him that none of that marvel is coming through in his writing and he asked me to write an intro rambling my thoughts a bit.. I’ll be brief but I want to pull all of our attention, John’s included, back to the sheer audacity and balls it takes to make things. To twist and pull the universe into the shape you see in your head. To work against all the constraints, and by gods there are so many, including the dishes, being in a shite mood or figuring out the mystery surface of a bending piece of sheet metal. Some days just getting labels square on a page is a minor miracle and all of you reading this, and John, too, are engaged in a battle against inertia, against the doing nothing, against letting life just slip buy without marking up the page a bit, or in context, bringing your chocolate into the world, or in John’s case, bringing this marvel of vacuums and flows from mind, to wood, to steel, for no reason other than it helps others to create their works. It scratches the deep itch of how to make it work for him and it advances what is possible in our tiny slice of the world. He takes for granted how not ordinary it is to see a project like this through, and he needs reminding, you need reminding and we all need to keep our minds on the pure act of rebellion that creation is, and celebrate some when we achieve it, lest we get waylaid and separated from our passions by that damned non-centered label margin that refuses to submit. The Flux is kickass and John should be a tiny bit more excited to share it with you here today. —ruzz
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Iterate, reiterate and iterate again.
13 years ago a small chocolate maker came to me basically begging that I invent a winnower for them. I deferred for some time as I was not sure how to do it. They persisted and started offering money for R+D costs effectively saying they could not afford to continuing to winnow by hand.
I’ve spoken about the progression in Ask the Alchemist 313 so there is no need to go over it again. Suffice to say it was a long road and I honestly thought I was done.
Except
People never stop wanting what people want and there is not a year that has gone by that I did not receive requests for a winnower in stainless steel and/or one where you could watch the winnowing process. To be fair, I tried to come up with one and failed multiple times. Either the designs did not work or were just too expensive.
Until
Not unlike Doc Brown and his Flux capacitor inspiration, about a year ago an image came to me and I just KNEW it would work.
The first prototype worked simply amazing. Iterated Versions 2, 3, 4 and 5 refined the process until the aptly named Flux winnower was born.
As you can see, it is a variation of our Aether Winnower, replacing the lower PVC with the new Flux Separation Chamber.
With that, the Flux Winnower is NOW AVAILABLE.
And unlike too many upgrades, this one is backward compatible, If you have an Aether Winnower, we are offering just the Flux Separation chamber and directions how to upgrade.
…..but that is not the end….
Upon showing our prototype to someone who shall remain nameless, their first comment was to ask for a compact more version…..so I built this.
I honestly can’t tell if there is a market or desire for it. It would be more expensive than the Sylph but probably less expensive than the Aether. It’s attraction is that the vacuum and husk bin (a 5 gallon bucket like the Sylph) would be contained in the rear cabinet so the whole thing would be sell contained and mobile. Yet another even less expensive version could replace the Flux separation chamber with Sylph style pvc pipe.
So you tell me folks, are those versions something you would like offered? I live to serve after all..