# Pt2of2 Home Made Incinerater



## NoIdea (Aug 19, 2011)

Now to fire up this little bad boy. I used a little bit of ethanol to get it started.





After the lot has been incinerated, the blower was turned off and allowed the remaining embers to ash themselves.






The end product is a bunch of fused lumps, small bits and ash, and after putting it through my grinder/basher/shredder a powder and metal beads rise from the ashes.


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## samuel-a (Aug 19, 2011)

Thanks for sharing that with us NoIdea .

I think the design can be somewhat improved, but your thread gave me some new ideas.


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## skippy (Aug 19, 2011)

I wonder if you could set something like this up as a cupola furnace, with some good refractory so you could run it nice and hot, feeding in layers of fuel,flux and scrap more or less continuously, periodically pouring out metal and flux. That would be very cool.


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## seawolf (Aug 19, 2011)

How do you deal with fume control or is this a process best carried out way out in the out back?
Mark


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## patnor1011 (Aug 19, 2011)

Lots of good stuff went up to stratosphere with smoke. :twisted:


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## NoIdea (Aug 19, 2011)

Hello – Thanks for the comments, yes indeed I need a scrubber. Because the boards were pyrolysed first to destroy the nasty organics, the smoke was a lot lower, though I am sure values were lost.

This design, sure, it needs improvement, but hey, look what it’s made of.

For this little fella, batch wise is all it can do, too much and the melt alloys with the iron base. Bin there done that. A system like a blast furnace I am sure would work.

In another experiment I fed LPG into the blower, pipe, using just the bottom can, which was filled with just kindling to start with, then wow, this really got hot and is best for processing IC’s, transistors, and fibre glass CPU’s. Fill the can full of fuel and lightly layer the IC’s etc, on top, and just keep feeding it fuel and chips. You will see, after awhile, the mass starts to fuse together producing larger beads >5mm in diameter.

The metal beads are separated re-melted and cast into an anode for refining.

I hope this sparks a few ideas, as I have acquired many ideas from others on this forum.

Thanks and Cheers

Deano


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## skippy (Aug 21, 2011)

Not only will values be going up with the smoke, but I imagine lead fumes would too. Something to be mindful of.


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## skippy (Aug 21, 2011)

Now I have a constructive idea. Here it is: take a metal tube, wrap it with heating wire and insulate the outside to keep the heat in. Charge it with your carbonized material, heat it up red hot, and then feed in air at a controlled rate to slowly burn off the carbon. Pipe the relatively small volume of exhaust gas into some sort of scrubber. It's going to use some electricity, but on the other hand it wouldn't require messing with extra fuel, and the scrubber could be small.


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## Acid_Bath76 (Aug 21, 2011)

you mentioned casting this into an anode? Can you elaborate on this? Anode or dore bar? I need to figure out how that word is spelled! (dore).


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## NoIdea (Aug 22, 2011)

Evening Acid, I have a homemade, cheap and nasty furnace made from old fire bricks and fed with a waste engine oil gasoline mix (90:1 respectively) burner. Air supply is an old vacuum cleaner modified, using the blow function, regulating supply by blocking the sucky sucky part. I bought a litre capacity crucible and melt using sodium carbonate borax flux. 

Casting into a 4inch by 4inch square and however thick my melt produces, somewhere in the order of 1/2inch. 

I have a electro winning cell with anode and cathode compartments separated by a semi permeable membrane (PVC clear plastic wrap, the type you use to cover food), 12VDC battery charger, sulphuric acid/copper sulphate electrolyte, a tad pit of sodium chloride to make sure silver drops, copper cathode, not sure about current.

Hope that answers a few question, anymore, ask away.

Cheers

Deano


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## jeneje (Aug 22, 2011)

Deano, how did you grind this up, if you don't mind me asking.

Thanks
Ken


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## Acid_Bath76 (Aug 22, 2011)

As for grinding, check out a "rockcrusher". It might be a little more money than you want to spend, but I couldn't be happier with it. It saves me time, and reduces almost anything to powder. It chews through PCB like cotton candy. I don't do that anymore though. I only use it on my incinerated material. Deano, I mentioned this on one of your other posts, so I apologize for double dipping, but could you snap a couple photos of this electro-winning cell? I think that's probably one of the most interesting contraptions to date. Why isn't this being done by everyone else? What's the drawback? Is it cost effective? Are you having to constantly monitor? Hats off to you sir.


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## NoIdea (Aug 22, 2011)

Morning All – Here’s a couple of pictures on my grinder/thrasher/smasher, made from an old LPG tank, the brass tap/valve was cut off flush with the bottle, this provides a bush for the shaft, bush is drilled to size. Another hole was drilled in the bottom of the bottle in order to insert the shaft, this ole is about twice the diameter of the shaft so it’s installation is easyer. The shaft is out of an old sewing machine drive shaft, with chains clamped in place, the grinder is driven by a drill, bigger the better. The top was cut out using an angle grinder; four holes were drilled in each corner of the square to be cut out. I have fashioned a plate to go over the plate cut out from the bottle. Draft strips were but on the bottle and lid to reduce dust.





It makes a lot of noise, so ear muffs are a must.

Cheers

Deano


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## NoIdea (Aug 22, 2011)

Acid_Bath76 said:


> ...... Why isn't this being done by everyone else? What's the drawback? Is it cost effective? Are you having to constantly monitor? Hats off to you sir.




Afternoon All – Acid, thanks for the reply.

I am sorry but I have NoIdea 8) about cost effectiveness or drawbacks, as for having to monitor it, well I just, during the day, like to keep an eye on it, though it’s not necessary, 12hr scrubbing of the electrodes is the only touching I do.

Cheers

Deano


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## Hephaestus (Sep 15, 2011)

I like the grinder/thrasher/smasher! What do you use it for? Any photos?


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## Desert Dennis (Sep 17, 2011)

Ghetto ,, What do you think it will take to turn it Back into PMs , Do they have an EPA. there if so hide.


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## kuma (Sep 29, 2011)

NoIdea said:


> Morning All – Here’s a couple of pictures on my grinder/thrasher/smasher, made from an old LPG tank, the brass tap/valve was cut off flush with the bottle, this provides a bush for the shaft, bush is drilled to size. Another hole was drilled in the bottom of the bottle in order to insert the shaft, this ole is about twice the diameter of the shaft so it’s installation is easyer. The shaft is out of an old sewing machine drive shaft, with chains clamped in place, the grinder is driven by a drill, bigger the better. The top was cut out using an angle grinder; four holes were drilled in each corner of the square to be cut out. I have fashioned a plate to go over the plate cut out from the bottle. Draft strips were but on the bottle and lid to reduce dust.
> 
> View attachment 1
> 
> ...



Hi! How are tricks ?
Hope your well!
May I just say that I have been looking at and thinking about a few ideas for a method of eventualy crushing/grinding my I.C.'s ect. for processing , and your great idea ( :lol: ) has really got me thinking , it's so simple it's ingeniuos! :idea: 
You don't happen to have a patent pending for this design do you ?
Just so I know how quick I need to be to get in there and knock one up for myself!
Many thanks and kind regards ,
Chris


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## bswartzwelder (Nov 8, 2011)

I made a small forge which should work well as an incinerator. I needed to bend some 3 inch wide by 1/4 inch thick steel plates which were about 20 to 35 inches long. I could lay the steel across the top of the forge and within about 5 minutes, it would be glowing bright red/orange. I have no doubt I could get it yellow by leaving it in the heat stream of the forge for a few minutes longer. 

Get an outdated 20 pound propane tank. Make sure there is no propane left in it. Cut the top off the cylinder. Next, I bought refractory bricks. They are very soft and can be easily cut using a saber saw. I cut the edges (beveled them)which butt up against each other and lined the cylinder with them. I put a 10-32 screw through each brick and on through the propane cylinder shell near the top to unsure the bricks wouldn't fall out of place. Then, using a 1.25 inch or slightly larger hole saw, I drilled a hole through the bottom of the wall and through the fire brick which was located there. I got a piece of 1.5 inch pipe long enough to go through the bottom of the cylinder and capped off the end inside the cylinder. Then I drilled approximately 3 rows of 1/8 inch holes in the pipe on the top and 1 row at approximately 45 degrees off vertical on either side of the top row. Where the pipe exits the cylinder, I screwed on a 90 degree ell and screwed a short nipple onto that. I filled the bottom of the cylinder up to the level of the pipe with sand to protect the bottom of the cylinder from heat. Put a small layer of standard charcoal on top and on either side of the pipe. Put a blow dryer outlet in the outside pipe nipple and turn on the fan on low speed. In no time, the charcoal will be extremel hot. Spread out the charcoal and place a nice thick layer of charcoal on the already hot charcoal. In no time, the forge will be extremely hot. If your blow dryer has several speeds, you can change the amount of heat generated. Fill the cavity about half way with standard charcoal. I use the match light type because it's easy. I plan you use this on very low heat to boil mercury in a home made mercury retort. This will allow me to reuse the mercury and will greatly reduce the mercury vapors which enter the atmosphere.


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## Jef (Jul 21, 2012)

I have an ore concentrate that I process from other materials that comes out just like this and I grind it to a finer powder. The question is what should I use to recover the platinum from it? XRF is saying I have between 1% and 3% Pt with the remainder Pb (one batch had a few percent iron). I was thinking hot aqua regia,...any thoughts?

The end product is a bunch of fused lumps, small bits and ash, and after putting it through my grinder/basher/shredder a powder and metal beads rise from the ashes.[/quote]


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## NoIdea (Jul 24, 2012)

Hi Jeff, alot of the fines (<200 mesh) contain iron and pose a big problem when using magnets, yes, acid would be an alternative, HCl in particular for the first acid digest, i personally use battery acid first, and then later HCl acid before a final water wash, ash, then Poor mans AR.

However, i am seriously looking at using a boiler sluice as a form of concentrating the gold fine. Hmmm, might make a new post and see if anyone here has tried one before.

Cheers

Deano


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## Jef (Aug 5, 2012)

Thanks Deano a prewash may be just the ticket.


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