Forum Activity for @Todd Masonis

Selmi users in Southern California?

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

polycarbonate source

Posted in: Classifieds F/S or Wanted

TAP Plastics sells all sorts of plastics including polycarbonate. They have many locations in CA, but should also ship elsewhere:

http://www.tapplastics.com/shop/product.php?pid=516&amp ;

Bringing cacao beans into the U.S.

Posted in: Travels & Adventures

I just returned from a vacation in costa rica and found that you can buy beans from the indigenous people on the caribbean coast. Their trade organization is appta ( http://www.appta.org/j15/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=48&Itemid=68&lang=en ), and you can buy some of their beans from the cacao house on the road to bri bri from puerto viejo for about $4/kilo.Also, John at Carribeans coffee shop in Puerto Viejo makes his own chocolate (actually conched as opposed to a lot of the other rustic chocolate you find on the coast) and is very nice to talk with if you end up over that way.

Small-scale (under 100kg) chocolate making equipment

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

We added the valve for a couple of reasons, the main one being that we'd get a lot of blowback with small pieces of husk blowing around everywhere. Also, it seems to winnow better with the input blocked off. Now we just fill up the hopper, put on the cap, and open the valve.The biggest husk does tend to get stuck going down, so we have to shake the hopper a bit. The medium and smaller sized pieces go down without any help. So it's not perfect, but it works pretty well for our needs. If you end up adding an auger or other improvements we'd love to see photos of them.

Small-scale (under 100kg) chocolate making equipment

Posted in: Tech Help, Tips, Tricks, & Techniques

There is a lot of information (and photos) on this page: http://www.thechocolatelife.com/group/homechocolatemakers/forum/topics/1978963:Topic:12336 Here is a photo of the winnower we made, based on the designs on that page.

We modified it so there is a shopvac on the exhaust. This is good for both clean up and it vastly improves the quality of the winnowing. We still have to presort the input, but have made a machine to do that for us.