One Grinder or Two

~patches~

It's a Chemical Rubber Company Micro-Mill. I would guess the intended use was to grind mineral fillers to be added to rubbers and plastics. Of course, I'll clean it extremely well before trying to run any food through it.

Only one person bid against me, with a max just above the starting bid, so I sniped it from them for something like fifty cents or a dollar above the starting bid. It was like $10 for the machine and $20 for shipping.

It has unusually nice styling for a piece of lab equipment. It's got a jadite finish, like an old Hamilton Beach malt mixer, and a nice squarish truncated pyramidal body.

Another piece of lab equipment I've been thinking would be interesting would be a microfluidizer from Microfluidics. I've seen a couple on eBay, which went for very reasonable prices, but in unknown functional condition. The drawbacks are a) the countertop versions run off of compressed air, not electricity, b) replacement parts are out-of-sight expensive, and c) they cannot be cleaned, except by pbutting cleaning fluids through it. If you don't know what the previous owner used it for, you really can't use it for food.

What would be cool is that the microfluidizer is the best machine I've ever seen for producing an emulsified, smooth product. One of their major uses is in the production of high-priced cosmetics -- this machine is one of the highly guarded secrets in that industry.

I'm very curious what it would do to chocolate. I think it could achieve a texture that might be beyond anything any other technology has yet achieved.