Have you ever had one of those brew days that you wished you had skipped? Well, today was one of those days. I learned the value of having a belt-driven mill the hard way. Luckily, my MM3 build is on indefinite hold until I can find the time to build a base; otherwise, it would have experienced what my Schmidling Model P experienced today.
I have owned two Model P mills. I have always manually crushed malt. I find hand cranking a mill to be kind of therapeutic. However, today I just did not want to set aside an a hour to weigh out and crush 11lbs of malt by hand, so I decided to enlist the help my DeWalt DW511 1/2" hammer drill. That was a bad decision. I hit a foreign object (most likely a rock), and the DW511 is so powerful that it pulled the object right through the rollers, leaving a handsome gash in the driven roller. This disaster has me rethinking the Bodine gear motor direct-drive setup that I have on my work-in-progress Monster Mill MM3. The beauty of a belt is that it will slip in this situation.