How are nuts mechanically shelled, without damaging the edible part inside?
Steam is involved, I believe. The nuts crack in the moist heat.
Speaking of moist heat…I thought this thread was about something else :x
-David
Yeah. I thought aha had regressed or something.
–Tim
I also was misled by the title. 
One would think that a machine could filter them according to size.
Then slightly squish them. After washing and whatnot they probably filter them again.
I don’t really know thats my WAG.
I really wanna know too. Good question. Anyone know the answer?
The Urge
C’mon baby don’t fear the reaper…
If you want to crack your own nuts at home with minimal damage to the meat, soak them in salt water for a few hours. Either do that, or call a dominatrix.
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. (Oscar Wilde)
"Initially, the peanuts go to the primary shelling cylinders. The majority of the peanuts are shelled here. The shelling cylinder is fitted with LMC’s rippled edged shelling bars and super duty grates…
While the peanuts are being shelled, an aspiration process is removing dust and shell fragments. After leaving the cylinder, the product will undergo another aspiration to ensure removal of the loose shells…
After aspiration, sizing begins. First the small pieces of oil stock are removed. Next, the large unshelled peanuts are sized off for return to the second stage shelling cylinder. The last product sized out is the split kernels.
This sizing process prepares the main flow of peanuts for the gravity separator. The gravity separator removes the small unshelled peanuts for return to the third stage shelling cylinder"
If you are really curious you can download the owner’s manual from this site as well.
Aha, the second question in as many years that I know something about. For those of you familiar with the recent chocolate orange thread, I have some experince of confectionary factories. At the same time I saw Smarties, Polo Mints and Chocolate Oranges being made I also saw the making of Walnut Whipples. These were basically small pyramids of chocolate with some sort of nougat filling and a walnut in the center, and I also asked the obvious question, how do you get that many walnuts out of their shells whole. Well it seems that they had tried a number of ways themselves, and found that any “impact” method broke too many walnuts to be economical. What they came up with, the clever chaps that they are, was a very ingenious system. The walnuts would be funelled into nut-shapes rubber molds on a conveyor belt, each mold holding one nut more or less loosly depending on the size and shape of the nut. Another, opposite mould would be placed on top, holding the walnut in place. This upper mold would have a small hole in it, not much larger than the diameter of a knitting needle. As the molds moved further along the conveyor belt they would come under a machine that had a very small drill in it; this drill would be extended through the hole in the mold and drill a hole into the shell of the nut itself, and then withdraw. Further down the line a small hollow pipe or needle (with the diameter of the newly made hole) would be put through the shell of the nut and a short blast of compressed air was pumped through the “needle”, exploding the shell and leaving the nut in tact. Clever eh.