wards grain buster

Anyone have any information on an old wards grainbuster hammer mill? I'm wanting to crack corn and this has sat in the barn for years unused. I need to know what kind of horsepower it's gonna take to run it. I'd love to find a manual if someone had one they share also. Thanks for reading.

You can probably drive it with a 20HP tractor if you feed it a bit more slowly. Is this mill belt driven?

I have an older Fairbanks Morse hammer mill/grinder that is pro driven.  It is mounted on pull type cart frame equipped with metal spoke wheels (1930s era?).  For years, I hooked it to my 1941 Farmall M to grind fat cattle feed (corn, alfalfa, & little soy meal supplement). The Farmall M is 36hp pto.  The 540 pto shaft came into a larger 3 belt 20"pulley that ran a smaller 8" pulley mounted on hammer mill shaft.  So, that combination speed up the mill shaft to 1350 rpms??  It had different screens (3/4" holes for ear corn, 1/2" hole, 1/4" hole-the one I used most, & 1/8" hole).  These screens were all 1/4" thick and about 12" wide x 18" length.  They were molded into a curved shape to match the arch of the hammers & wrapped around the base of the hammers arch where the grain had to exit.  Once sized, the ground feed would be sucked up and transferred via a blower which was also on the hammer mill shaft.  It had a moveable flow panel on its feed shoot.  At a maximum, it could eat about a 3/4" depth x 12" wide of grain flow.  The small bay alfalfa was feed in, one beat at a time after the grain.  It was all that I had at the time, but it did a good job. 

It's belt driven yes. Has an approximate 6 inch diameter input pulley. Was hoping maybe the little C would turn it. Probably grind less than 500 pounds a month if that much.

hook it up and run it, you'll soon find out what it'll handle and what it won't!

Power required will be affected by the screen in use as well as how fast you can shovel grain in.

Make sure you stake it down good.   You will need at least 2 old buggy axles cut in half and driven almost all the way in the ground. I do have a belt pulley that goes on a 540 PTO shaft. I don't know how fast the PTO turns compared to the belt pulley on say a WD45. That is what we used 2 times a month to grind ear corn for the fat cattle. The last mill we had was a Case. Dad decided to grind corn by himself on a weekday. One of the hammers broke off, it landed on top a 3 story barn and when the dang mill stopped flopping around it was about a hundred feet from where it was staked down. Pop wasn't hurt but from then on, the neighbor would bring over the truck mounted corn sheller.

Edited by HD6GTOM - 08 Apr 2020 at 5:31pm