Our team in Southwest Haiti has a great stand of moringa. They are looking for designs/advice on creating a press for production of oil. Similarly, they want to produce Neem oil. The press should be made locally and not require electricity or any fuel as they are both expensive and unavailable. Any suggestions?
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Dear Sir
After researching press for different kind of oil this is my result.
This is a good and robust manual press and versatile use. You can even motorized it or use a bicycle.
I’ll try this press soon also for curcuma juice
Best regards
Alain Sebilleau
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Thanks. I like the concept and am interested how it could be scaled up. Any thoughts on why they need a heat source?
The heat source is for softening up the oil and increasing the outcome (sorry for my bad English…
This option from ECHOcommunity might be helpful to the discussion.
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Hi Gordon,
I agree with Alain, the Piteba press is a good option for small scale manual oil extraction. The article that Steve posted is a network member’s quest to replicate the Piteba press at a much lower cost by using locally available materials. I have never tried comparing the production between the two, so I can’t say if the extra cost is worth it. The only presses I have tried are a couple replications of the Piteba press and a ram press. All require a lot of time and energy to produce much oil. Another option (which I don’t have experience using) is a hydraulic jack press, years ago they used these for moringa and neem oil production in West Africa. See attached document for more details.
As far as scale up, what sort of scale are you thinking? Do you have a market for the oil? Demand will determine what sort of investment you should put into scaling up. Another network member in Senegal has found a great market for their moringa oil, so much so that they invested in a Kern Kraft kk40 double screw press, they are producing somewhere around 1 liter/hr. From your first post though, I’m not sure how feasible an electric press would be if you would also have to provide your own power.
I have attached a couple of other documents that might be helpful:
CWS Moringa Oil Press.pdf (7.4 MB) How to Use Your Ram Press.pdf (1.4 MB) Optimization of oil extraction from Moringa Oleifera, Trichilia Emetica and Jatropha Curcus using Ram and Spindle presses.pdf (557.3 KB) .
Please let us know if you start pressing oil, would love to hear what you learn!
Thanks for the information and the links. I’m anticipating with the number of moringa trees planted, and growing well, we will have an abundance of seeds and everything else.The hydraulic jack was one direction I was going to try. Bottle jacks or car jacks are common anywhere I’ve been. I’m working on a hand or bicycle driven chopper to chop the seeds before pressing them.
The advantage of the moringa for this project is the trees were started from large straight branches spaced apart to act as fence posts, if we can market the leaves and seeds great, if not it’s not a big deal like having a huge crop of mangos with no market. The idea is to keep the cost of any processing at a minimum. Electricity is not an option nor are generators at this time. I’ll keep playing around and let you know what works.
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Here are some presentation slides from 2013 which include information directly related to your question.
https://www.echocommunity.org/resources/a04f97e6-915e-4531-8010-20b26fd93266
Press similar to Piteba but a lot cheaper:
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Hello Gordon
I am on a similar mission - looked at the piteba several years ago but the reviews on various platforms are not that encouraging overall. I ma tempted however to try the Vevor recommended below, subject to shipping costs. Are you panning to dehull/decorticate beforehand?