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I just got a metal lathe and mill as well as a new workshop to house it all so I’ll be upgrading all the champagne bottle manifolds and other carbonation tools as well as starting a culinary focused machine shop services program. I should note right off that one of my big inspirations for learning all these new skill sets was visiting the boundary pushing Industry City Distillery in Brooklyn. They set up the distillery to subsidize their machine shop and they built pretty much all their own equipment. They are very accomplished fabricators and I can’t wait to see what they do next.
To start, I’m making new manifold prototypes that have a much higher degree of precision. This is purely cosmetic, but it is still very important. Once the manifolds are cast, I can erase mold lines on the lathe or mill’s rotary table and make everything look spectacular.
A small problem I’ve been having is that the Italian company that makes the stainless 19/32 fittings changed their specs. At the moment you cannot bore them to 21/64 for a down tube then have the option of using the down tube or not. In their new spec there aren’t enough threads to catch at the top. But I can easily fix this on the metal lathe.
I’m also trying to roll the 90° flange that is on a 5/16 stainless keg down tube. These are probably done on a very specialized pneumatic press and it is very different than a stainless brake line flange. On the small scale, no one seems to be doing anything similar in stainless steel, but I have some leads on a technique which involves pulling the flange with a live center mounted on a tool post while spinning the tubing.
I’m also going to mill new molds for the food safe silicon seals. The seals have to be centrifugally de-aerated in a Jouan C412 centrifuge because pressure and vacuum are not enough for the extra high durometer material. I plan to make them so they can nest and I can stack them five high in all four centrifuge cups.
I developed a new technique where I can precisely mold reliefs of engraved objects then use a rotary table to mill out recesses on the prototype to hold the precise castings. The flat cast reliefs can then be curved around the round prototype (eventually I’ll have pictures). Basically, I can start to brand the manifolds either with engravings I’ve collected or specially designed for brands that want to sponsor them like Campari®. With a good setup I anticipate I can do these in both very short or very large runs.
As far as my culinary focused machine shop service goes, I will be volunteering shop time to help very high end culinary programs, particularly kitchens, bring ideas to life that otherwise might not be economically viable. If I agree to a project they will only have to cover the material which is often quite low. Ideas are piling up and hopefully I can inspire other hobbyist machinists to also collaborate in the name of profitless art. Restaurants move money, but they don’t exactly make money so many ideas just can’t come to life. At the same time, there are countless garagiste machinists that make steam engines and model rail road gear just to have something to make. If we can bring these two groups together, culinary greatness might happen.
What I envision are very simple things like a gear for a broken machine, a precise food safe seal. A small food safe mold. Small milled parts to bring antique equipment back to life. For slightly larger projects, I want to make food safe inserts for centrifuge cups and then other larger objects. To do bigger jobs I have the use of the Bridgeport mills and larger lathes at the Artisan’s Asylum.
For very complex objects, I want to make a rotor stator blender bowl for a Vitamix to push the boundaries of homogenizing liquids. This will be similar to my colloid mill but using a blender motor and designed only for liquids (I also have to make some new food safe parts for my colloid mill). I’m also conjuring a peristaltic pump type beer engine that might even have an archaic steam punk style to it.
More to come. Feel free to hit me up with ideas.