Hey you mechanically inclined folk! Please help revise engineer this chocolate pump
 

Mfg wants $800 for a simple auger pump.

No *(^%## way I'm spending this much.

Put your brain and life experience to work, help me reverse engineer this, and I'll send you FREE chocolate goodies.

Auger must fit into size of pan shown in video. Farm grain augers won't work! :)

Thanks



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I'm in to see what CP can come up with.

There's really not anything to reverse engineer. It's just a simple vertical auger. The problem would be finding/machining parts that would fit and work well with something as viscous as melted chocolate. Which would probably be a real PIA. I'm not sure you're going to have a simple cheap DIY solution like you're looking for. It would probably take a pretty substantial pump to work with chocolate.

Yeah. It’s just machines parts and a motor.

I don’t know all of what food grade is but looks stainless. Not sure what kind of poly the auger is.

Honestly, I’d see if amazon or wherever else has a cheap knock off.

You combine the two: one to keep the chocolate moving and the other to pump it up....I think it should work and much cheaper

That was extremely creative and inline with the legacy of CP!

I would hate to deprive you of your personal items. :)

ROFL

They work great for me and once in a while I dip them in chocolate for a special treat. ROFL

Suck lightly on the end of the tube.
Then, place your lips around the tube's end and suck like a straw. Pull the chocolate just over the rim of the container of chocolate. Once the chocolate reaches the arc of the tube, it will start to come down the tube. Move your mouth and insert the tube into the bucket.



I’m strangely turned on....

How many cars did you siphon gas from in your late teens, early twenties?

ROFL... We had a old pickup that had the gas tank behind the seat with the cap right behind the drivers door... I would siphon gas for the lawn mower out of it... I learned the thumb and pull method pretty quick..LMAO

My ex brother in law, the idiot okie he is, went to work for Seaboard. Called asking to bring a gas can. Someone had siphoned his gas. He said “they were nice enough to leave the hose for next time.” ROFL

$800 is lot, but it's specialized piece with high performance demands.

So you're not talking about off the shelf parts bin assembly from mass produced components.

It would easy enough to spec and fabricate, but now you are talking about a made to spec one-off, which brings your costs right back up.

Point being, the difficulty isn't in the engineering, it's in the cost containment.

Like if you saw an amazing custom set of headers for an engine, or an amazing piece of furniture. Someone could replicate it with enough specs and visual cues, but then the labor involved in fabrication would bring your costs right back up.

That is, unless you compromise and accept the performance specs of off-the-shelf kit even if they don't meet that of the desired product.

Maybe an easier route would be to shop around for some high performance chocolate fountains from a restaurant or restaurant supply suffering from the quarantine economy, and then fabricate alternative piping off the impeller, or maybe even scout out a distressed candy manufacturer facility for some of their food-grade components.

Your biggest pinchpoint is acquiring a motor that will move material of that viscosity quietly and cleanly without burning out. Most reliable options eat up half your cost right off the bat [why I recommend looking into closeouts on commercial fountains]. Next is the fit and finish of the augur and tube. There's tons of tubing out there, but fabbing the augur, likely preferably out of silicone, to match the tube, is the costly part. Then you need a clean and reliable link between motor and augur that will likely need to be custom fab.

Yep. Exactly my thoughts.

Thus, I appealed to the collective wisdom of CP and Reddit.

2" PVC, 2" auger bit, Drill, dremel, duct tape, a metal bowl and a couple hose clamps, silicone and vice grips.

It won't be food safe, but it will operate.

Just cut 4" and 14" section of PVC, cut the 4" in half, drill out a hole in the larger PVC 10" up, use the half 4" section as the downspout, and then dremel out an intake at the bottom. Glue/silicone/duct tape it all together, vice that bitch to the metal bowl, fill with chocolate, run the auger bit down into the PVC still attached to the drill, duct tape the trigger down and watch her go.

I'll try that with 2" stainless pipe. thank you!

30 bucks.

Visit a Golden Corral and ask to buy a used Chocolate Wonderfall.

Another factor, that even the unit above doesn't seem to handle [though commercial units do], is the temperature gradient within the transport [tube]. If you don't have a warming apparatus around your tube [or a thick enough tube to keep the melted chocolate near warmed], you're going to have the chocolate cooling inside the tube and stressing the augur and motor further.

If I were creating this from scratch, I'd at least work to minimize the height of the transport from the well of heated product to the dispensing point to minimize this effect. Maybe some sort of hot water collar on the tube as well.

Out of curiosity how much would you pay for one of those?

I knew a couple of you old farts like me would get this spot on. The youngsters, not so much. :D

Honestly, the fountain idea doesn't seem half bad unless you for some reason need to keep the chocolate your working with in some other warmer.

Just replace the tube with the pans that covers the auger with a same size 304 stainless tube (probably about 1-9/16" ID), have someone weld some small pieces of pipe on one end for fastening similar to the tube you get with it, drill a hole on one end for a stainless spigot, and assemble. Just transfer your chocolate from your warmer to the fountain before working with it.

Otherwise you'd need the same shit, stainless tube, spigot, auger for a fountain, and a motor that runs in reverse (the fountain turns the auger the opposite way the one in the vid does). No idea what the specs for the motor would be. I'd imagine you could get a used fountain and tear it down and work off that.