Steve Gaber

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