If anyone has ever tried liberating a Black Walnut from its shell, you understand how difficult the task can be. Black Walnut are very hard. To get more than a meager handful of meats is a major project. For those of you who read the ending first, the cools stuff happens at Step 5.

Here is my tested technique to get the maximum number of walnut chucks, sans the shells, relatively quickly.

Step 1. Get a clean metal bucket, a clean sled hammer, and safety glasses.

Step 2. Put a handful of cleaned and totally dry black walnuts into bucket. Only the rock hard part of the Black Walnut goes into the bucket. This presumes that you have already removed the iodine-rich soft outer husks. If you haven't already removed the outer husk, this needs to be done first. I don't have a quick way to perform this prep other than just letting them totally dry out. Then the husks can be easy removed.

Step 3. Mash the walnuts into smaller piece, until you can see the walnut meats are being liberated from the hard shells. At this point, you should end up with thousands of pieces roughly mashed walnets shells and meats. The pieces of the meats that are still stuck in shells are too large and need to be broken down further.

Step 4. Using a large plastic graduated cylinder or suitable container, make a super saturated water & salt solution. I don't have exact measurements, but just keep dumping in more salt into the water until it stops being mixed the water and starts to pile up a little at the bottom while you stir it.

Step 5. Dump in the mashed up bits and chunck of black walnuts. Immediately, the shells and the meats separate like magic. The meats float, and the shells sink. Give it a good stir and push everything down as you stir. You need to perform the process more than once to remove all the stubborn tiny parts that float too. Usually twice more does the trick, but not always. Keep an eye out for floating shell parts. I have separate containers for the three procedures, moving the floating result from container to container.

Step 6. Rinse the remaining nuts or not. But at this point they will be super salty. I like to rinse them a little.

Step 7. Enjoy.

Step 8. If you repeat the process, the solutions will need recharging with more salt.

I've got a big black walnut tree. I've never thought they were worth the trouble. Occasionally I'll get a 1x2 stake and go whack walnuts to get them out of the yard. Man those things are tough, I can bat some of them 100 yards and they never break.

Removing the outer husks:

Spread walnuts on your driveway (gravel works best) - drive over the walnuts a dew dozen time - tada

BTW that give you an idea how hard black walnuts are - driveing over them doesn't crack them

I always found them easy to open - a bring a bucket down to the bandsaw, and cut them open (More power)

Caveman. Never good at chemistry. Put walnut on flat rock. Pick up a BFR and whack walnut. Eat soft parts...

I Have try this I love black walnuts but have never known a way to get enough to realy make it worth my time.

I got to step 5 expecting something along the lines of "light the fuse and cover your soft parts".

I guess chemistry doesn't always have to include large booms...

Nice tip though. My parents have a beautiful black walnut tree in their yard. The squirrels always steal the nuts and hide them in mom's car.

-Blast

Sorry about putting "safe" and "chemistry" together for you in the same sentence. I guess it does kind of take the fun out of it. For my buddy Blast, here are the modified instructions:

Step 5. Light fuse and run for cover. You also might want to consider ear, eye protection and non-flamable clothing due to the energetic nature of the explosion.

I have tried this on asphalt and it didn't work too well for me. Gravel would definately help to hold the buggers in place. I just hate handling them until the husks are dried and fall off. Otherwise you get covered with the black dye or yellow dye depending upon how old the nuts are.

I have thought about creating a water powered device that works like an automatic fish scaler. I have a stream with flow that could do some work. My vision is a basket that is anchored in the stream bed and rotates with the flow. You just fill it up and let the stream do the work and carry the mess away.

I suppose it would be easier to just pick up a bag of Black Walnuts for $1.59 at the grocery store, but nowhere near as fun.

Now for your next trick let me know how to clean my hands from the walnut stain

I haven't tried these remedies, but Google turned up the following: lemon juice or gasoline.

I use gloves and old clothes when handling these nasty things. Fortunately, the dye it isn't permanent....but close. If you do get it on your hands, it does wear away after a few days of scrubbing and funny looks from your friends.