The bucket strainers will be to restrictive in draining the honey as it flows out of the extractor. You will be spinning out 60 to 80 lbs every 20 minutes. For this year until you can get set up with sumps and pumps, you will have to poor honey from one pail to another. But lets start at the beginning.
Extracting honey on a medium scale.
Honey flows out of the frames much easier when it is warm. if you can keep the honey at hive brood nest temperature it flows the best with out causing any degradation of the honey. This can be done in several ways, Heat the whole honey house, a lot of power or gas and you are left working in an extremely hot environment. Hot room, hot closet, hot box, an confined area that you can place the supers to be heated. It should be sized to meet the extraction capacity so you can continue extracting and not have to wait for more supers to warm. On a small scale with out space for a dedicated hot area, an easy way to achieve this is by using a 60 watt indecent light bulb in a trouble light as a heat source. Place a super pallet or a light hive cover on the floor for a drip tray. Suspend the trouble light in a empty super making sure the bulb is protected from drips as a drip of honey on the hot bulb could cause it to shatter. Then stack your honey supers on top and put on a lid to keep in the heat. You can make as many stacks as you need to meet your extraction needs. In 24 to 36 hr the honey in the stack will be 35 deg C. and ready to extract.
Uncapping, It is nice to have an automatic uncapper but it is not the only way to go, a uncapping knife is slow and I have found that just raking the cappings with a cappings scratcher will do the job quickly. Here is a video of a friend that uses a scratcher to uncap for his 60 frame extractor. Don't worry about the wax, it will come out in the extractor.
Loading frames. Assess the frames as you are uncapping and loading them into the extractor It the frame is broke fix it have a few extra bottom bars and a few frame nails to repair the frames and if the wax is not attached to the bottom bar, which happens more often when the beekeeper tries to go foundationless. If the wax is not attached to the bottom bar well or you broke that connection fixing a frame, put some rubber bands to keep the combs in place. By next extraction the bees will have attached them. Try to keep the extractor balanced but with deep frames spaced out evenly between shallow frames.
Extracting. For get the extractor even has a reverse. This would only be needed if you had the 4 tangent racks (sold separately) used to extract European over sized frames or Heather honey that is thixotropic. For use as a radial, one direction is fine and it doesn't matter which direction. Start off at the slowest speed and run at this speed for a good 5 minutes, this will get most the bulk of the weight of honey out of the frames. After you can slowly increase the speed one step at a time letting the extractor run for a minute before advancing to the next speed setting, till you hit top speed Then I would let it run for another 5 minutes. You can gauge by looking at the rate and frequency the honey is hitting the extractor side. There is a point where the amount of honey coming out of the frames is not worth the electricity being used to run the extractor. Or your time waiting to load the next batch of frames. If the comb looks like it is not well attached and supported I might be hesitant to put it in top speed.
Honey flow from the extractor. During the extraction the honey is wiped through the air causing it to cool rapidly. Straining at this time will be a slow process. The honey flow slowly when cool and the wax clogs the screens. I would suggest using a modified system of what commercial operations use. I assume that you are using 20 liter buckets for honey storage and bottling. With this in mind and as I stated above, Still don't worry about the wax Let the wax and honey fill your raw bulk honey buckets. To strain the honey you want to warm it back up to hive temperature. At 35 deg. the honey will flow through the strainers like water, and while the honey is warming back up, the wax is floating up to the surface. So over the same light that you used to heat the supers place a couple of sticks to place the pails of raw honey on, make a box to go around them and a lid on top to keep the heat in. This can be empty supers or a wood or Styrofoam box. the next day the honey will be warm the wax will be concentrated on the top of the honey making it easy to remove most of the wax by skimming it of the top then pouring the warm honey with little wax left through the filter screen.
The wax will still have honey in it as well as some honey scooped up during the skimming off the wax. Dump this into a bucket that you have drilled some 5mm holes in the bottom. Using the same light heat source Place the cappings in the box and let the honey drip out into a catch bucket.
As a hobbyist they want to pull, extract, filter, package, and get things clean up in one day. I understand this, but in doing so they are fighting cool honey, and suspended bees wax that clogs screens. I suggest a way to getting the honey flowing in your favor with a little warmth. It is easier on the comb and on the nerves. It is so much easier straining honey when you can pick up the bucket of honey and poor it through the strainer in one go, than having to keep pouring a little in and waiting for it to flow through.
