Re: [BlindHandyMan] Considering building my own apple drier or dehydrator

[Betsy Whitney, Dolphin Press]

Aloha Matt,
My friend made trays with extruded aluminum just 
like some folks use to make window screens. Then 
she could just take them out in the yard and squirt them off with the hose.
She made a tent out of screen that was open on 
the bottom so it could just be set over the whole 
stack of trays. She used some sort of round metal 
sticks to separate the stacked trays. I remember 
that she had some sort of round stops on the 
separation sticks, and the frames of the trays 
had wholes for the separating sticks to fit into.
I'll try to reach her via email. She lives in 
California now, but she used to dry apples, 
pineapple, bananas, papaya, mango, parsley, and basil when she lived here.
Betsy
At 11:37 AM 7/9/2010, you wrote:
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>Hi ya folks. Lately I've gotten into drying 
>apples and cooking pies and stuff out of them. 
>Mainly, I started out buying them already done 
>from a Mennonite owned store. I quickly got 
>addicted to them as snack food, then found 
>recipes for making pies and breads out of them. 
>I looked up instructions on drying your own. 
>They suggested oven on the lowest setting, or in a car on a hot day.
>The oven works, but your spouse complains about 
>the oven always being busy, and you can only get 
>so many in there at 1 time. And it does take at least 6 hours the way I did it.
>My wife suggested I not buy a dehydrator, 
>because as it is I am a gadget buyer. And ya 
>start running out of space to live after so long.
>Just now I am considering building a wooden 
>frame which would hold cookie sheets stacked but 
>spaced from one another 1 on top of the other, 
>and buying screen to cover the outside to keep 
>some bugs out, and putting an old fan I have out 
>in storage in one end of it. My idea lacks the 
>heat element factor, but I live in east tx, and 
>am figuring, I could set it up in the attic, or 
>out in a back room where there is no air 
>conditioning. I could go to the trouble of 
>forming my own screen trays, if I wanted to 
>build them, but then cleaning something like 
>that with a wood frame? I don't think that would 
>last long. Anyone ever done this stuff, say, to make jerky or whatever?
>just curious.
>
>Matt
>
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