Out of 14 machines, he and Ray figured there was enough good hardware mixed and matched to get one small unit running properly, with Ray handling everything related to the burner, ignition, fuel system, and wiring himself and Malik handling the mechanical assembly and airflow work under Ray’s direction, with anything electrical checked and completed under Ray’s supervision before it ever got tested live. It took most of the summer. Ray came by on his own schedule, checked every fuel connection twice, tested the ignition system thoroughly before anyone loaded a single kernel of grain into the unit, and made clear to Malik exactly which parts of the process were his to touch and which weren’t.
By late summer, they had one small dryer running. It heated. Air moved through it the way it was supposed to. Malik ran the first test batch, corn pulled at a modest moisture level from a neighbor willing to let him experiment with a small amount. The batch came out of the dryer noticeably drier than it went in. Malik felt like he’d solved the whole problem in one summer.
Then he pulled samples from different parts of the batch to check the way Ray had shown him instead of just trusting one grab sample from the top. The numbers didn’t match each other. Grain from one part of the batch tested too wet still. Grain from another part had dried past where it needed to be, over-dried enough to worry about quality if it kept happening. One sample had told Malik the grain was drier. Several samples told him whether the dryer had actually done its job.
“Heat did what heat does,” Ray told him, looking at the spread of numbers. “It just didn’t do it evenly. That’s not a burner problem. That’s an airflow and depth problem.” Malik hadn’t thought about drying that way before. He’d assumed without really examining the assumption that hot air moving through grain meant the grain dried more or less the same everywhere given enough time. What Ray was describing was more complicated than that. How deep the grain sat in the dryer. Whether air was actually moving evenly through that depth or finding its way through unevenly instead. How long any given kernel actually spent inside the airflow. Not just how hot the air was when it got there. All of it mattered, and none of it showed up just by checking the temperature gauge.
Malik started keeping a log for every test batch after that. Grain type and starting moisture, batch size, moisture out sampled from multiple points instead of one, airflow settings, grain depth, how long the batch ran, ambient temperature outside since that changed things too. It wasn’t glamorous work, mostly numbers on a clipboard, but it was the only way to actually see what was happening instead of guessing from how the grain looked or felt.
His first instinct, when he kept finding wet spots in test batches, was to turn the heat up. More heat should dry more grain faster. That seemed obvious enough. It made things worse. The wet spots dried out some, but new inconsistencies showed up elsewhere in the batch, and a portion of grain that had been fine before came out over-dried and cracked under the higher heat. Malik lost a real amount of test grain to that mistake. Not a huge quantity, but enough to sting, and enough to make him stop and actually think about what Ray had told him instead of reaching for the simplest lever available.