Oostendorper watermill revisited: a look inside

Another set of photos of the Oostendorper watermill near Haaksbergen, The Netherlands I posted about earlier, this one:


Olympus Stylus 1s, 55mm, ISO400, f8, 1/80s, one television aerial edited out

I went back to try and get some shots of the inner workings of this water mill, but I only managed one as there were too many people inside. First, a shot from a different angle:


Olympus Stylus 1s, 47mm, ISO400, f8, 1/160s

Only one of the water wheels was turning, powering the oil mill:


Olympus Stylus 1s, 28mm, ISO400, f8, 1/10s

The shaft of the water mill goes into one end of a reduction gearbox, you can see the gearbox' outgoing shafts entering the photo below on the right:


Olympus Stylus 1s, 28mm, ISO400, f8, 2.5s

The shaft in the back drives a vertical cog wheel, which drives a horizontal cogwheel with two vertical, small milling stones attached to it. These milling stones roll over a vertical larger milling stone you see at the bottom. The linseed or rapeseed is crushed between them into a oily pulp, which is then processed in the next stage.

The pulp is put into a hollowed wooden block with a wedge on top and a small hole in the bottom. A vertical battering ram is used to squeeze the oil out. Here's a picture of the battering rams:


Photo by Rasbak, from WikiMedia Commons under a CC BY-SA 3.0 licence

The bits sticking out of the axle lift and then drop the battering rams on top of the wedge.

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