A One Inch Dough Mixer

Large batches of rare varieties of wheat are sometimes difficult to obtain due to a combination of low yields and/or small plot sizes. To avoid squandering a potentially vital resource, during testing with typical size dough mixers, the CSIRO decided to construct a tiny mixer only 30 mm in diameter. The path taken by the beater pins follow a curve known as an epitrochoid (grey curve). The difficulty in constructing such a small mixer is that there is surprisingly little freedom in the initial placement of the beater pins if one wishes to avoid hitting the bowl pins.

The solution to this problem is given in the paper Epitrochoidal Mixer.