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Got a few questions here.

 

First I have a small impact mill that takes 3/4 minus material and will crush it to 100 mesh or smaller. I am looking for something that will take 2 or 3 inch material down to 100 mesh and not break the bank. I am looking for a gas powered unit that can be run on site.

 

I am running desert material so all of my rock is dry. I fill buckets and take the material to Oregon. I crush it then run it through a concrete mixer with just a trickle of water and some Simple Green. Then I run the concentrates through a Gold Genie which recovers a large majority of the gold. The problem is I am left with a lot of rock that is oversized, most in the 1 inch to 2 inch range. My material is coming from a pit next to Rick Watkin's first pit in Nevada.

 

Or maybe there is a more economical way to go about this or even with fewer pieces of equipment? Any other ideas?

 

Thank you!!

Steve

 

 

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Steve,

I see you posted at 1:30 am. No wonder you never answered me on phone this pm.

hope you get good response to this on rock crushers. Im still looking for fatherinlaw

A good rockcrusher remember? Glad to see you are still kickin, ground gonna thaw

before we know it are you ready? (Sorry about greenbay ) not really!!

Rick

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Hi Steve, glad to see you posting here!

 

If you go up in the upper right and click your name and choose settings you can set your time zone, which changes displayed times. Otherwise the forum can't know what time zone you are in.

 

The only crusher I am familiar with that will do the job is the Keene RC-46 but I am guessing at $7950 it breaks the bank for this application. I have a couple other people I hope chime in by tomorrow.

 

I had a Keene RC-1 which was a great inexpensive unit but no better than what you already have.

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Steve,

   I've got a hard rock prospect that I am still in the prospecting stage on. So I have been looking at small crushers also and have been

in contact with Jason Gaber of Mt.Baker Mining & Metals. He has been designing some great small scale processing plants. 

 You might want to check out his Youtube videos

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2YZ3quCL1k

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Commercially, rock crushing is done in multiple steps. You should consider the same type of set up.

My suggestion is that you consider a small jaw or cone crusher that will take 4 inch minus and take it down to 1/2 minus, then take the 1/2 minus and use your existing crusher to go down to minus 100.

A big commercial mine would probably use a jaw to go from 24" minus to around 3 inches, a cone to go from 3 to about 1/2 and a ball mill to go from 1/2 to whatever the goal is - 100 mesh or whatever.

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 It sounds like a small jaw crusher is what you need. The ICMJ has had several jaw crushers in the classifieds lately. Try to find one that  replacement plates and bearings are available for.  Have fun and keep us posted.

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Steve,

   I've got a hard rock prospect that I am still in the prospecting stage on. So I have been looking at small crushers also and have been

in contact with Jason Gaber of Mt.Baker Mining & Metals. He has been designing some great small scale processing plants. 

 You might want to check out his Youtube videos

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2YZ3quCL1k

 

Small world Dick. I stopped by and visited Jason and his father Steve this summer. Jason is working on some very interesting stuff. Good people, and they do very good work. I had sent an email to Steve last night asking them to chime in on this thread then came back and saw your post here. Here is their website:

 

Mt. Baker Mining and Metals

 

and Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/MBMMLLC

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Hi all and thanks for all of the info.

 

Gold Stryker makes an impact mill that takes 3 inch material and will crush it to 100 mesh (in one step?). It is gas powered so can take with me but they are above my budget.

 

Most of the material I work with is hardrock with very little placer workings up by Rick. We dig out the vein and spread it out to detect. When we hit a hot spot we fill buckets or in Ricks case large containers. We bring these home and concentrate them. In Rick"s case he uses a drywasher (placer) and I use the crusher (lode). It is a bit labor intensive but does work. We would like to simplify and speed up the process as well as increase our output.

 

Rick, I am thinking of your Father-in-Law. This is all the same process. If I find a small table that is inexpensive I will buy one. Hoping that will increase my recovery that much more.

 

Thanks again,

Steve

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Hi guys, thanks for the kind words. Mt. Baker Mining and Metals is alive and well, selling jaw crushers, hammer mills and shaker tables for the small scale miner. This has been a real interest for son Jason and me for years. My retirement a year ago allowed us to kick it up a notch and the business is catching on.

Steve Houston, you have a dilemma facing many recreational miners- making large rocks into powder on a hobbyist’s budget. I don’t think there’s an elegant answer. You’ve actually asked two questions. Taking 2” rocks to ¾” minus can be done fairly quickly (hundreds of pounds per hour) with a piece of thick plate (1” or thicker) in a small enclosure on a work bench. Build a simple enclosure, put the plate in the middle and use a 3 lb hammer to break up the rocks. It goes surprisingly quickly and costs almost nothing.

If you want less effort or more thru-put, then a jaw crusher is a good tool. They come up on eBay occasionally, and you can look for a lab crusher or consider one of the imported models of unknown quality. Small ones go for ~$2000 or less. The smallest we sell is a 6” x 10” for 1-2 ton per hour production at $5,500, ready to run.

The other question was going from ¾” minus to powder. That takes an impactor, which has fixed paddles on a rotor (like a Stutenroth), or a hammer mill or flail mill with hammers, bars or chains. These come in all variety of qualities and costs and unfortunately, sometimes high cost does not necessarily mean high quality or long lasting- so be sure it will do what you want before purchasing. We sell a 12” diameter x 9” wide hammer mill with forged manganese hammers and a 16hp gas engine for $4,950, for instance. An alternate is a make-shift ball mill, which you now have and works well on a limited budget.

The thing about impactors, hammer mills and ball mills is that the discharge comes out in a range of sizes, so if you want a particular minus fraction, you have to classify the discharge, or overgrind your ore. I note that you detect for high grade ore, so I expect some of your gold is fairly large (pick with tweezers). We advise against overgrinding, since anything abraded off the gold particle is too small to be captured with gravity concentration. So we like to reduce to a fairly coarse grind, run it thru a sluice to get the larger gold, regrind the oversize once the gold is removed and feed the screened undersize to the table. We feed <20 mesh to our table and get a surprisingly high percentage of gold recovery in most cases, down to microscopic size, as well as capturing the cons/sulfides with values before they are ground to fine powder. If the table tailings still have values worth processing, the tailings can be classified to the commercial liberation size and the oversized reground in the mill.

Thanks for the opportunity to chime in, Steve Herschbach, as it’s one of my favorite topics! And thanks for the nice website and forums. I’m glad to get on the phone, too, if anyone wants to talk in depth. We’re also pretty low-key and welcome miners to our shop in Bellingham, WA for a visit.

Steve Gaber

Mt. Baker Mining and Metals, LLC

360-441-7519

Website: www.mbmmllc.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MBMMLLC

YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/mbmmllc/videos

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I have a great buddy that has a few crushers he wants to sell (Sacramento Area) , told him to join the forum. He should show up this eve.....

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