Stuff Made Here built a steam-powered fruit peeler that operates above 1,000 kPa to explosively decompress and flash-boil the water beneath fruit skin, ripping it off in a single clean sheet. The mechanism is borrowed directly from industrial potato-peeling machines, but no video of the process existed online until now.
The engineering is where this gets interesting. The boiler is two stainless steel plates clamping a central cylinder, sealed with face seals and held by threaded rods. Because the rods and vessel body expand at different rates under heat, Belleville washers absorb the differential. A separate lower-pressure fruit chamber is welded, uses a softer O-ring door seal, and includes a glass viewing window held in place by pressure alone and 3D-printed brackets.
The machine successfully peels apples, potatoes, grapes, lemons, strawberries, blackberries, and corn on the cob, one piece at a time. The full build video is worth watching not for the results but for the specific problem-solving: custom jigs to machine flat pipe ends, the choice of face seals over welded joints, and what happens when you vent 1,000 kPa onto a grape.
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