This monster appeared near Mary’s Vassar Farms plot:
I had to look up trommel, too.
Apparently suffering a breakdown, it spent the next two weeks idle with all its covers open. The can of WD-40 makes a nice touch, but the condition of the central lubrication panel suggested the last grease went through those Zerk fittings quite a while ago:
The manufacturer’s information label, tucked in a protected position, remains pristine:
Scrawled notes near the control panel noted that someone installed new oil and fuel filters in late 2004, with 4103 hours on the running time meter:
Then, one day, it vanished, perhaps back into the mysterious universe from whence it came …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
5 responses to “Power Screen Trommel”
well, it didn’t come home to Ireland…that plant closed in 2007
Poor thing: it’s an orphan!
Aren’t false friends lovely? A trommel is just a drum: a washing machine has a trommel, a musical instrument is called a trommel, etc. Your kind of trommel on Wikipedia is called a zeeftrommel or trommelzeef (zeef = sieve, so sieving drum or drumsieve).
The OED says it’s unclear whether drumme/dromme is an independent English word form or whether it’s a 16th century loanword from Dutch or Low German.
As someone observed, English doesn’t just borrow words from other languages. It drags them into the alley, knocks them over the head, steals their wallet, and empties their pockets…
That sounds rather unfair. ;P All of that French vocabulary was forced upon it, while trade across the North Sea—and therefore mutual borrowing of words—has always been extensive. The most famous Old Dutch sentence, for example, is practically indistinguishable from Old English. The languages hadn’t had much time to grow apart yet.
NB The hypothesis advanced by Luc de Grauwe, mentioned on Wikipedia is said to be most likely mistaken because William the Conqueror kicked out the English monks and imported friendly monks—including from allied Flanders—to populate the English abbeys and monasteries.