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Hello Mr. Gaber (too many Steve's here!) glad you joined the forum. Your expertise is valuable indeed.

Just wanted to mention on this thread my use of the Keene RC-1. It is relatively inexpensive at MSRP $1095 and a bit different in how it works. It takes 1" or smaller rock and slings it at high speed at a steel plate using centrifugal force. The rock basically explodes like you shot it from a gun. It is very effective on hard material. However the resulting material varies in size so needs to be screened and oversize run trough again.

An interesting thing about it is since the rock is exploded, gold comes out of the rock relatively intact. This would be good for ore with chunky gold enclosed because the gold does not get ground down and is easier to recover.

Because there is no grinding going on wear and tear is minimal, and replacement parts cheap and easy to install. The unit is also very portable and being gas powered can be run anywhere. All in all one of Keene's better values.

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The Keene thing is an impact mill - and actually they can be fairly high wear as the impacting quartz does wear pretty good on the impact plates. As long as you are not crushing large amounts of material the low cost counteracts the high wear cost, so they are good for semi-pro / amateur use. (way better than a dolly pot)

As Mr. Gaber says, over crushing is to be avoided for lots of reasons, worst of which is loss of values. Its this fact that caused the death of the stamp mill a century ago. The only way to avod over-crushing is to have some screening step. In a ball mill you can have an integral self classifier that keeps in the coarse and lets the material that has reached the desired size move on to be processed - thats the standard commercial set up. I have seen some small 3 - 4 foot diameter ball mills that are small enough for a small mining operation.

Mr. Houston - do you use iron balls in the concrete mixer?

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Hi Reno Chris, I have tried iron balls but seems there is not much difference. I have it all crushed to roughly 100 mesh with my impact mill before running the material through the mixer. The main problem is my impact mill only accepts 3/4 minus material.

 

Steve

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So if there is not really any crushing going on in the mixer, is it just to wet and mix the material prior to treatment?

 

With the comparativly small amount of material you are crushing, perhaps a little assay lab type jaw crusher to reduce stuff to minus 3/4"  - sometimes these can be had cheap used on ebay, craigs list or some such source - maybe even the ICMJ classifieds. Thats what I have......

post-5-0-31364800-1389458905_thumb.jpg

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That looks like what I am looking for, a pilot mill. Or if I find one that will do both steps I think that would be the way to go.

 

The concrete mixer wets the material so I can run it through my Gold Genie it also tends to get rid of the light material leaving the heavies behind.

 

I will start watching ads.

 

Thanks,

Steve.

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