Made-in-Minneapols Mild Steel Drums

If you haven’t heard or don’t yet know, we build pretty nice roasters.

We’ve got a very experienced team of engineers, designers, and fabricators on staff and thousands of square feet of very sophisticated and very powerful machinery. We hold CSA lab certifications for nearly all of our roasters, NSF certification for Minneapolis-modified machines, and are a UL 508a-certified electrical panel shop.

We design, modify, and test roasters and ancillary packaging equipment, and scent reduction equipment under real-world conditions in our on-site working, Minnesota State food-licensed roastery.

We continue to currently produce 40 to 80 roasters per month at our dedicated assembly facility in Shenzhen. They bob across the Pacific Ocean in shipping containers, rattle across the Rocky Mountains via Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railroad, and are delivered to our 11000 square foot shipping and receiving facility a couple blocks away from our headquarters in Minneapolis. All of these crates are opened and inspected with every machine functionally tested before shipment.

So that side of the operation is literally and figuratively on rails.

The arc of our progress is still upward, however. One of the new things we’re doing is fabricating drums. 

The pictures illustrate some of the work that goes into a 2 kg electric drum.

The 7mm drum wall is cut on our 6000-watt fiber laser and slotted to precision locate the internal supports and mixing vanes. Those internal pieces and the rear perforated drum wall are also precision cut on the same laser. The drum is rolled round on one of our 2 Lamas plate rollers and TIG and MIG welded. The internal pieces are fitted and TIG welded. We precision turn a slightly more durable bar of steel into a drum shaft and assemble and weld the shaft and rear wall to complete the assembly.

The entire drum is then chucked up on a lathe and ground bright and smooth. The drum is then moved to a much larger lathe where the drum face is trued to the shaft to within about .001”.

This is a lot of steps for what you could be mistaken for thinking a simple part, but every single step has to be exactly correct to ensure excellent thermal transfer, drum gap resolution, more precise machine control, and more even roasts.

We’ll be offering custom Made-in-Minneapols mild steel drums on every 2kg electric roaster and very soon as an option for every single Mill City Roaster.

Stay tuned for much, much more to come.