Introduction: Grow Your Own Cooking Oil

By LoganMackey LLC
About: Neo-Renaissance Man

   You want to be more self sufficient? Well here's a way to grow your own cooking oil.

Sunflower Seeds
Place to grow sunflowers
Seed oil Extractor
(plastic bottle tubing small funnel wire screen strainer)
Glass Jars


Step 1: Step One: Sunflower Seeds Buying, Growing, Harvesting

  There are two basic kinds of sunflowers, confectionery the kind you eat, and black oil. the kind you feed to birds.  The black oil sunflower seed is the kind you need. These have twice the amount of oil as the confectionery.  These seeds are easy found at almost anywhere. i bought this 40 pound bag. for $14.00.       This is enough seeds to grow as many sunflowers as you need. I used two flowerbeds on the back of the house and the back of my garage.
     And covered the beds with seeds, i had so many it was like a carpet of sunflower seeds.
  And that was it. Sunflowers grow like weeds they need little water, little room, and grow almost anywhere. And you can grow a large amount in a small space.
  Once they grow and there heads get big and full of seeds, you know when to harvest them when the pedals drop off and the head falls over. Cut off the head and store them in a plastic bucket until they dry out, then shake them the seeds come out pretty easily.
   at the end of summer you should have enough seeds to make cooking oil for the rest of the year.
Unless you deep fry a lot or something.
  But since i didn't want to wait a year to show you the seed oil extractor and how to use it i started grinding the oil out of what was left of the seeds i bought.


Step 2: Step Two: Putting Together a Seed/Nut Oil Extractor

  Seed oil extractors can be made (http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel_library/oilpress.html)
 And and sold, most are very expensive then i found the PITEBA seed oil extractor.  This is made in Holland, and is operated by hand.  i paid $125.00 and im glad i did. (soon i will post a instructable on hooking this up to a motor).
  So this is instructions for putting your PITEBA seed oil extractor together.
 1. Make sure you have all the parts, the unit, crank ,spiral, bolts glass bottle, wick/washer, End cap, End cap bolt.
2. Mounting the Piteba, this pretty much has to be mounted to something like a table i used a drill to make some holes in the table 3 2 for bolts, and 1 for a small tube. ( the piteba, has 2 screw holes on two sides.)
3. After mounting this to a table, next is to oil the washers with eatable oil. and slide them onto the back of the spiral. this slides in one way through the front until the shaft comes out the back hole.
 4. Screw in the crank, with the small screw bolt .
5. Screw on the end cap, and lightly screw on the end cap bolt.
6. Fill glass bottle with flammable liquid im sign 92% rubbing alcohol, thread the wick through the washer hole and top the bottle. and light it. ( it takes about 10 minutes for it to heat up to the right temp)
7. Cut the bottom off a 2 liter bottle, i had to sand the top a little to make it fit in the top of the PITEBA seed oil machine.
8. But a bowl at the one end
9. Put a small strainer or a piece of mesh in a small funnel. A plastic tube is threaded through the 3 hole i drilled, and into a glass jar.  this will collect your seed oil


Step 3: Step Three: Extracting Seed Oil

Now that your Piteba is up to temp, START CRANKING!
I took me about 20 minutes to crank out a 2 liter bottle of sunflower seed and got about 12 ounces of sunflower seed oil. Though this does not sound like a lot it is.
    After you have started to crank the seeds through a little stop and remove the end cap bolt.
Now you will see a long dried out "sunflower turd" for lack of a better word. This is good for animal feed or fertilizer.  The oil comes out black, this will be settled out in two weeks.


Ive Included a short video of the seed oil extractor in action.



Step 4: Step Four: Fishing Up

 Now that you have your sunflower seed oil, it needs to settle out the sediment that take like two weeks.
I have tried to strain it, but could not find a mesh size that worked well.
Now you have to clean the Piteba, Make sure you have grind all the seed out. And let it cool down, now the end cap will be blocked SOLID with sunflower seeds, this is like removing concert! I used a drill this seems the easiest way to get this clean. im experimenting with soaking in vinegar or something to loose n up the seed cake.

Wipe the whole machine down and your finished.
 Once the oil is settled you still have to siphon the oil off the top and pour out the think bottom sunflower sludge.

 There Now you will have cooking oil for life! enjoy.