A week before I finished this project Jon asked me if, at some point, I’d ever paused to question why the hell I would ever endeavor to make a Jeep-powered, PTO-drive ice cream maker. (Of course, the exact wording from Jon was a little different.) The simple answer: no. Not only no, but hell no! This is one project I was absolutely sure needed to be done. I think this is one of the best uses of my education and training. Sure, having a career is nice but a Jeep-powered ice cream maker? That’s just a sublime embodiment of the thrill and interest of that academic intrigue… In other words, the damned jeep powered ice cream maker is just cool.
I owe much thanks to Jon and Dave for a helping hand from time to time, philosophical guidance, and ‘encouragement’ (in the form of “you idiot…”). Now it’s time to enjoy this little toy, and hope like crazy it stays together.
In this installment, I’ll review some of the planning that went into this project as well as some of the preliminary fabrication.
My 3B has a ‘custom’ rear bumper and is missing the rear cross member with the bracing to the second-to-last cross member. It was this way when I bought it, and I do like the rear bumper. This was a good and bad thing; with the original frame parts missing, there was no way I could use a factory option PTO shaft and rear gearbox. I saw this as a good thing, since those parts are very expensive. Also, I could design my own PTO shaft and have it come out of the rear where ever I wanted. The problem (or challenge) is that I’d have make this from scratch. This was 80% of the ‘Ice Cream Maker’ project.
I started with some sketches and I came up with a final sketch below for the sub-frame, stand for the ice cream bucket and the pulley layout. Part of what I had to figure out was how fast the ice cream maker would need to turn, and what size pulleys to use. I did a little experimentation and math, taking into consideration the engine idle speed and the transmission gear I planned to run it in. You can click the image for a larger view.
The first step was to mount a pulley onto an off-the-shelf hand-crank ice cream maker. This was easier than I expected. The original shaft that mounted to the hand crank was threaded on the end with a 7/16” thread. All I needed to do was to adapt a common weld-on pulley center to the 7/16” thread.
In the next installment, we’ll take a closer look at Jon’s favorite part: the sub-frame.