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November 02, 2020

Luther’s new self-contained plansifter: The novel way of propelling stock

by Mildred Cookson, The Mills Archive, UK

My last article on the new Alsatian mills summarised a 1909 report in The Miller. When writing that, I was intrigued by the emphasis on a new Luther Plansifter, so I went back five years to the April 2nd, 1904 issue of Milling, which reviewed the equipment in detail as “the novel way of propelling stock”. This earlier article featured fine engravings of the new plansifter and a view of them installed in Van Gruisen and Co’s Mill in Boom, Belgium.


At that time, the journal asserted that all millers would acknowledge that sifting on level surfaces of silk cloth or other separating material was correct in principle, but the method had not been largely adopted because the generality of sifters then in use were not free from mechanical faults. The main difficulty was not so much the application of a sifting motion, as combining it with enough agitation of the material being sifted to provide the separation without excessive vibration.
 


Inclined sifters had been used in mills for years, although only for separating rough material, such as wheat and offals. Until the plansifter was introduced many less successful attempts had been made for dressing softer material, such as meal. The overall aim was to get the true sifting motion of a hand sieve, where the sieve is not turned over, together with agitation enough to separate the material, without disturbing the strata of heavy and light stock and with a minimum of vibration.

In Britain, a new plansifter was promoted by Emil Fiechter of Liverpool. It had been invented by the Brunswick firm of Messrs G Luther, a firm of mill and silo builders established in 1846. The machine was an entirely different kind of the plansifter developed from a design first introduced into the UK by the same firm in the early 1890s. I have previously reviewed reports in 1892 and 1893 that first of this new form of plansifter to be used in the UK was installed at the mills of Joseph Appleby and Sons of Blackburn (see Milling & Grain March 2020, page 22). These first machines were put in by Mr Fiechter, displacing 3x3 sheet centrifugals and 3x2½ sheet reels.


Read more HERE.
 

The Global Miller
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