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Making A Passive Food Dehydrator On My Radial Arm Saw

I made a passive food dehydrator using my radial arm saw. This will be used over the wood stove or in the sun to passively dehydrate food for long term preservation.

 

I got a radial arm saw recently and immediately got the idea to make this project. We are processing a lot of apples from our own homestead right now and we need a way to dehydrate food in a hurry. We have been using the gas oven pilot light to very slowly dry out food but this is a very slow process. To dry a lot of food we have to speed up the drying process.

 

I have some scrap lumber left over from a project that I grabbed for the food dehydrator. This is 1 x 10 lumber which I had run through the planer at one point to clean it up some.

 

Homemade Passive Food Dehydrator

Passive wood stove or solar food dehydrator

 

 

I cut it into two 24 inch long boards and then did some drawing and measuring to get an idea how I wanted to make the slots for the drying racks to slide into.

 

The idea was to make two side boards with cut out slots which hold the drying racks in place.

 

I finally got the idea worked out and marked the board where I wanted to make the cuts.

 

I raised the radial arm saw blade so it cut just short of halfway through the boards. I made a test cut to have a look at the depth and make sure it was not too deep. Then I made the rest of the cuts. About 6 to 8 passes of the saw blade made each 1/2 inch slot in the wood. This is working very nicely so I kept going.

 

I made an exact duplicate of the first side board. Now I have the two sides. I tested it out with a dehydrator rack and it worked perfectly.

 

Next I took some 1x3 lumber and cut some pieces to hold the side walls together.

 

 

 

 

I have 9 food dehydrator racks from an old machine that died long ago. These now fit perfectly into their new frame. We can dehydrate a lot of food in this new dehydrator.

 

Now I have a passive food dehydrator which I can use over the wood stove or in the sun. To use it over the wood stove I will make a metal frame to hold it up at the right height so I dont cook the food too fast or damage the wood frame. As a passive solar food dehydrator I will cover it up to protect it from the sun's UV rays and then put a passive solar heater under it.

 

You can watch today's video here:
Watch the video now  Making Passive Food Dehydrator At The Off Grid Project

 

While you are over there please subscribe to my channel and follow our daily videos as we strive to become self sufficient and off the grid on a budget.

 

Feel free to ask any questions or get help with your project on our Discussion and support forum





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Troy Reid

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