Wonder Junior Basic Hand Mill

This grain grinder was bought to add to my long term storage for when the crap hits the fan. I've tried it several times and it works great for whole grain wheat, both white and red. It IS work, but what do you expect? An electric one would be much easier but for disasters, who will have electricity? I mounted it to my workbench in my shop with 4 screws.Very solid! Easy to clean! All powder coated paint. Stone grinding burrs work very well. Definitely though there is a learning curve to make bread and NOT HOCKEY PUCKS. The rise time must be extended a lot.Well worth the money.

I'm beginning on a quest to try turning whole grains into quality bread. I opted for the WonderMill Jr. over the electric WonderMill because I thought it would be good to have something that works no matter what happens. I may eventually get the electric WonderMill, but I thought I'd start out with this one first.I screwed the mill to a 2x6 board about 14" long then clamped it down to the table with a pair of c-clamps. I knew I didn't want the mess from grinding grain without a flour guide. I figured it would be an easy thing to make one myself and I was right. I just took a plastic potato salad tub, similar to a large cottage cheese container and cut a hole in the bottom to go around the hole where the flour discharges out of the mill. I then drilled three 5/16" holes in the plastic so it would slide down flush with the face of the mill over the roll pins that hold the stationary stone from turning. Once that was accomplished I trimmed the top of the tub off so that there was about 2" of the sides of the tub remaining. It fits between the face of the mill and the stationary stone. It doesn't look great, but I'm very satisfied with how it works.I did as the instructions recommend and ground a pound of grain to break in the milling stones. I ran that pound of flour through a second time and then cleaned the mill with a 1" paint brush and threw away the break-in flour. I didn't notice any stone grit in the bread I baked from any of the following batches of flour. For my first batch of bread I measured out 6 cups of hard white wheat berries and started cranking. The crank is long enough that it's not too difficult to turn, but I got tired. The flour that came out is a mix of fine to course grind. I sifted it as I went with a standard hand crank flour sifter, and what fell through I kept and what didn't go through the sifter got dumped back into the mill hopper. This took a pretty good bit of cranking on the mill. It's winter, the house is about 55 degrees and I'm sweating. I drank more than a quart of water before I was done with the final grind. Once I got my six cups ground and put through the sifter once, I tested the flour by rubbing some of it between thumb and fingers. I thought it was still a little too coarse so decided to run it through the mill again. The finer you grind it the harder it is to get the flour to feed through the mill. It wants to cavitate in the hopper. Wheat Berries feed without any assistance, but flour will not feed on it's own. I found that a sharp, light upward whack to the base of the hopper with a soft pine 1x2 about 12" long was effective at getting the flour to drop into the auger. Regrinding the flour is a LOT of work, but I ended up with some real nice finely ground flour that is very close to the consistency of store bought all purpose flour.It was a pretty good workout and it feels like I found some muscles that haven't been used for a while, but I expected that going in. I do find comfort in the fact that when the power grid fails and I can't find any more gasoline for the generator I'll still be able to grind flour. Hand cranking for non-emergency use however is not something I want to keep doing. I don't think I'll enjoy it much when the weather turns hot. I'll get the adapter to turn the mill with an electric drill and see what result I can achieve with that before I spend the money for the electric WonderMill.What I've learned from this experience so far is, I wish I would have spent the extra money for the deluxe kit. It would have been worth it to get the stainless steel milling burrs, flour guide, mounting clamp and electric drill adapter. You need most of the stuff to make the mill usable and the stainless burrs look like they'd be real nice to have too. I think this mill will be great for grinding feed for chickens. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that large corn kernels and most beans are too big to fall into the grooves in the stone milling heads. Looking at the pictures of the stainless steel burrs it looks like you can get much bigger seeds to go through those. They should be good for grinding animal feed. I also learned that this is a quality, well constructed product with a durable coating. All things considered I'm very happy with it so far and I'm learning as I go along and I expect it to get much easierUpdate: 02/29/15I got the drill adapter for the mill and have been grinding hard white wheat with it. The drill bit adapter is not a good way to motorize the mill. I tried it first with my DeWalt DW235G 1/2" drill which I thought was a fairly strong drill, but it was not up to the task. The problem is that the drill spins at too high of a speed for milling and if you try to use less trigger to turn the drill at a slower speed it puts too much load on the drill and overheats the motor. You could burn up your drill easily using it with this mill.Next I tried it with a big 1/2" Makita drill that I have. It's a powerful drill. It's variable speed and also has a low and high range selector. Even on the low range it spins too fast for milling, but at least it turns it. This drill also gets very hot turning the mill. You have to give it a lot of cool down time in between short milling sessions. Since I have been unable to use the variable speed to turn the mill at a slower speed I found that a technique of pulsing the trigger works fairly well. The stones and the flour both still get warm, but not as bad as when you hold the trigger down. The mill just doesn't work well at the higher speeds that a drill turns it. The grind is much more coarse and you have to regrind a lot more than when grinding by hand. It's also hard on the stones. You can see the wear from it. I also noticed I was getting grit from the stones in the flour that I was not getting with hand cranking. It makes a lot more of a mess than hand cranking also. I did not have any problems keeping the adapter engaged with the auger shaft.I got a fine mesh sieve and that is working well to separate the flour from wheat that needs more grinding. I have had zero problems with the grain feeding through the hopper since I've been using it.I also got a set of the stainless steel milling burrs. They are great for big seeds, coarse grinding and oily seeds. I've ground pinto beans and field corn with them and been happy with the results. Using a drill to turn the mill works a lot better with the steel burrs. I have seen a video of somebody making nut butter with the steel burrs and electric drill power and it looks like that works quite well, but I haven't tried it myself.Using the drill bit adapter with the big DeWalt drill that WonderMill recommends might give better results than what I've experienced, but I'll bet it's still less than ideal. I'm not going to find out. Rather than spend the money for the bigger drill I just went ahead and ordered the electric WonderMill. I'll keep this one for emergency flour grinding and for coarse grinding with the steel burrs. Of course it's still a great mill any time I want a workout turning the hand crank. That's always a good way to get warm on a cold winter night.

The wondermill just arrived, and no clamp, no flour guide, no steele burrs. The ad did not say that these were not included and must be purchased afterwards if you want them! I should have read these reviews first. Has anyone successfully made a flour guide that actually works? It sounds like the one they did not send does not work well anyway? I would love to hear other comments about either using the flour guide, not using any flour guide, or making your own guide.

I owned the Whispermill and loved it because I could set the fineness of grind change it and then return to the exact setting and get the exact same grind. It lasted for a long time and because of one of mt mistakes, it quit working properly. $230 down the drain so I decided to try the manual wondermill because it could be fixed and was durable. I'm glad I didn't buy that $30.00 hex drive. Could have ordered one but had an 18 mm socket so only needed the drill drive which I bought from Amazon. Hooked up the drill and dang near broke my wrist. Loosened the grind and it sped up throwing flour (Kinda Flour) everywhere. The flour guide is as worthless as holey toilet paper. I will be forced to buy the 12" pully and electric motor further increasing my expense on a non precision grind. I should have paid attention to the ratings listed on the other Amazon sellers, they had it right. this is like getting into a Ponzi Scheme.

This just came from Amazon in one day! I should have looked at the picture more closely, it does not include the "optional" mounting plate and clamps. What you see in this picture is it. The quality seems good and it goes together with no tools in about a minute, but now I need to build a mounting system, unless I just want to bolt it onto a counter top or old desk. Wonder how much they are going to want for the mounting option... geezs... pricey for some steal and 2 grinding stones, I am tempted to design and build one my self and sell it for half the price with the mounting plate included.I have been looking everywhere for about a month for a good grinder that will work in a power outage and all the stone grinders, from the manufactures I found, are pricey. Couldn't be the cost to construct, it must be that there is just not a big demand. Once I use it, I will give a complete review, but for the price, in comparison to others, I think this is the lowest cost for something of quality. I already tried one of the $15 to $20 cast iron old fashion mills and it desintigrated and seized up in 3 minutes of cranking on some beans (coo-dos to Amazon, they sent UPS to pick it up and returned my money, one of the reasons I try to buy direct from Amazon, they stand behind the products they sell).3 Stars till I try making flour. I would have given 4 now, but for the money, you would think they could include mounting hardware.

Works great, can make a real fine grind. I deducted a star because they don't include the Flour Guide. You really cant use this mill with out the guide. Other than not including the guide (I purchased separate, didn't get the deluxe model because I can't use the mount) this mill is built solid and does a great job grinding wheat. I got the drill attachment and that can crank out a ton of flour.