Quainton Windmill
The Wire Machine on the North Side of the mill is for dressing, or grading, flour and is driven by a belt from the lay shaft over the centre of the room. This is powered in turn by a belt, via a drive shaft on the floor above and is meshed with the great spur wheel when flour grading is required. The wire machine comprises a set of rotating brushes pushing flour through a gauze-covered cylinder. Freshly milled flour from the millstones is fed into the cylinder from a hopper on the floor above. The graded flour is collected in sacks hung below the machine, and bran is discharged into a sack at the bottom end.
The ends of the reefing stage beams can be seen just below the floor above. The original scales and weights used for weighing sacks of flour are situated on this floor.
Also, on this floor and awaiting restoration is a joggling screen machine, known as a Jog Scry. It did not originate in this mill and came from another mill, location unknown. A jog scry was an early form of flour grading machine in widespread use prior to the introduction of wire machines, and used thereafter for a variety of sieving tasks. It has varying grades of gauze in the panels of its false floor: the floor is moved rapidly to and fro by a belt-driven cam, thus sieving the different grades of flour through the gauze into sacks below. The overhead lay-shaft that drives the wire machine has a cam fitted on its that could have driven a jog-scry, but whether one was ever installed here is not known.
