Farming Fridays

This McCormick Deering cream separator is used to separate fresh milk into cream and skim milk. Often the skim milk was consumed by the farmer and his family and the cream was saved to make butter, or it would be sold.
Before the centrifugal mechanism such as this one, milk was separated by letting it sit in a container until the cream floated to the top and could be skimmed off by hand. But the centrifugal separator makes it possible to separate cream from milk faster and more easily, without having to let the milk sit for a long time and risk it turning sour.
This one was originally a hand cranked machine but a motor was later added around 1925. The fresh milk gets poured into the supply can at the top, and then leaves the bowl through a valve on the side and passes into the disks where the cream separates. Good separators have a bell in the center of the gear (ours is missing); this allows the user to tell when the cream separator was being cranked at the right speed, usually 60 revolutions per minute. If the bell was ringing the cream separator needed to be cranked faster. This speed was very important for the cream separator to operate at peak efficiency. There are two different spouts at different heights, the top spout pours out the cream and the lower spout pours out the skim milk. Floor model cream separators such as this one often have a swinging platform where a bucket would go to collect the cream.