Don't people get valley fever from spores in the raisin drying process in California in the '30s??
If you use a heating element be sure to have a reliable thermostat. You probably don't need so much heat as you do adequate air movement. How about a clothes drier maybe with a tilt and chute like a cement mixer <GRIN> ----- Original Message ----- From: Cy Selfridge To: [email protected] Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 8:52 PM Subject: RE: [BlindHandyMan] Considering building my own apple drier or dehydrator Hi, I concur with the fact that you would probably be just as well of purchasing your dehydrator - but - in case you wanted to build one use ΒΌ inch hardware cloth. It is sturdy enough to keep out unwanted birds and such and will allow plenty of air circulation. I read (somewhere) that simply placing the fruit or whatever in your dehydrator on the roof will do a bang up job of drying it out. Cy, the Anasazi From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Matt Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 6:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] Considering building my own apple drier or dehydrator Your wooden frame and screens is kind of what I am thinking just now to start with. Did you use a heat element and a fan? I'm rummaging around for unused stuff to play with the idea. Sitting here with a small fan in my lap just now and pondering perhaps an electric skillet as heat element to go in bottom? Probably here in east texas, all I would need is a screened in box with vented racks of some sort, and maybe a fan at top to speed up the process, but I haven't decided yet. I'm wondering about some sort of webbed or porous material to stretch over dowels or wooden frame as trays. Still in the pondering stage. Matt ----- Original Message ----- From: Jim Gatteys To: [email protected] <mailto:blindhandyman%40yahoogroups.com> Sent: Friday, July 09, 2010 4:45 PM Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] Considering building my own apple drier or dehydrator Hi Matt! I used some old wooden frames and screen nailed across them for racks for years but finally broke down and bought an excalibur dehydrater. Best investment I ever made. I dry tons of stuff from my garden. I'm in west Texas and in the summer I keep the dehydrater outside while doing onions and tomatoes. Works great. Jim On Jul 9, 2010, at 4:37 PM, Matt wrote: > 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 > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] > > [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
