Electrick Kinetic Pecan and Nut Cracker

Works great

This machine works exceptionally well. Bought a second one for a friend in Africa.

It broke the first pecan I put in it. Is very slow and have to adjust a lot

This machine does crack the nuts okay, but you have to really watch how you put them in the cracker opening. You also have to be quick and develop a rhythm to keep from getting your fingers in the way. Not something you would let a child use.

works real good but it miss fires after 8 to 10 pecan and then crackers again for 8 to 10 more

I purchased one of these from the factory about 5 or 6 years ago. My Mom (82) and my Wife (65) collect the pecans from our trees and the neighbors. Some years there are just a few nuts but other years we are loaded.This was a loaded year. One day as I went into the shop, my Mom said of the cracker, "This is the best thing you ever bought!" They have processed about 8 5-gallon buckets of pecans. They usually just go through them and crack a lot of them then go through and separate them. Our nuts are pretty hard. Sometimes you have to put a nut in two times but it gets the job done.Some of the nuts may be too small and the cracker won't crack them. Those are mostly shell anyway.There is some minor maintenance they recommend but it is minimal. I also bought a foot switch to allow the user to just press the switch to turn it on or off. There is a toggle switch. This just makes that process quicker.I may look intimidating initially. There is a turning PVC pipe with slot in one side. You place a pecan into the slot as it goes by. There is a spring loaded hammer that is pulled back by a tapered PVC cam that releases during the rotation and slams the nut against an anvil in the end. There is a sliding PVC shield that keeps the nut from falling out. One rotation takes about 3 seconds and the cracked nut falls out the bottom. Allowing for some missed rotations and double cracking, It can crack about 10 to 20 nuts a minute or around 900 per hour.It takes a few minutes to get into the rythm of the machine for placing the nuts into the machine. No one has had their fingers caught in it as some reviewer feared. If you get things setup, you can keep up with the machine rotations and place one nut per rotation pretty easily. You need a pan under the machine to catch the nuts and a box or pan for the nuts. My Mom holds the uncracked nuts in her lap to make it efficient to pickup the nuts and place into the machine.Cracking nuts get little shell peices all over the place. I suggest you work in a garage so you can sweep or vacuum the area later. Also, pecans have oil, like most nuts, and you will need to clean the work areas. Remember to to the manufacturer's maintenance at the end of the season.If you only crack a pound of nuts a year, you don't need this. There is an excellent inertial nut cracker that uses rubber bands that uses a similar process. It is a manual process and much slower. Cracking 5 gallons over a period of time, this would be a good choice.We crack a lot of pecans and freeze them ready-to-use. This machine is hughe time saver.You are going to have to pick the meat from the shells if you want to get all the meat out. A lot of ours a halves but many are not. We try to save as much as we can. Our nuts are NOT paper shells and have pretty hard shells. It is hard to take two in your hand and crack them. Other pecans are easier to crack and shell. If you are buying your pecans, you can choose from a variety. Ours are stright from the tree so we take what we have.So this is not the least expensive machine. You could probably make one yourself. It is hand-mad in the USA. For our purposes, this has been a wise purchase. Would would not hesitate to get another one. Just take some time for the short learning curve and it should work for you.

I did not purchase our kinetic cracker through amazon. I purchased it 5 years ago off eBay. I run an 800 acre pecan farm and a cleaning plant where we not only sort and clean our pecans, we also to custom cleaning for several other farms. A large part of our process is quality control which means we are constantly sampling the nuts as they are being sorted. Our kinetic cracker is running almost nonstop for 10 hours a day, 3 months out of the year. It works great! We process Western, Wichita, Bradley, Mohawk, Cheyenne, Sioux, Chickasaw, Shoshone and Pawnee varieties. Some varieties shell easier than others but this cracker does it’s job well. I thought I would have had to replace or repair our unit by now but it just keeps on ticking and shows no sign of stopping. I happened across this on amazon as I am thinking about getting a spare but now I know I can have one shipped in 2 days readily, I’ll just wait and keep using this one.

I Also bought a nut cracker years ago and I love it. I have small native pecans an I shell a lot and send to my children and for Christmas goodies. I also freeze them.