For crushing ceramic chips?

One lady wants plans for a ball mill for $40. Does anyone have other ideas on how to crush chips into dust? I saw a nuts & bolts falling inside a 14" steel pipe with a slanted angle iron to raise the nuts & bolts up to fall on the chips. Does anyone know how this works. Anyway to run it quiet?

Thank you.

Paige

There are plans on the web, I think most
are for pyrotechnics, but will work the
same for our purpose. I have them on my
laptop and will post the links when I find them,
or they should be easy enough to find with a
web search on; ball mill plans, or build a ball mill,
or build grinder or crusher, also.

Don't buy the plans for $40 from megan rose, I am sure
you can get the same or better for free online. She wants
way too much for everything she sells.

Here's a topic on the forum where this was discussed:

http://goldrefiningforum.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?p=2384&highlight=#2384

Be sure to scroll up and read the whole thread.

Steve

Here are some links that will probably be better than $40.

http://www.unitednuclear.com/ballmill.htm
http://www.pyrotechniques.org/dwilliams/mill/mill.html
http://www.privatedata.com/byb/pyro/ballmill/
http://www.abymc.com/Articles/Submitted/Ballmill.html

Paige said:

One lady wants plans for a ball mill for $40. Does anyone have other ideas on how to crush chips into dust? I saw a nuts & bolts falling inside a 14" steel pipe with a slanted angle iron to raise the nuts & bolts up to fall on the chips. Does anyone know how this works. Anyway to run it quiet?

Thank you.

Paige

Click to expand...

Ball mills are designed to run at a particular speed. When you run at the proper velocity, the charge and balls are taken to the top of the drum, at which time they fall, crushing the contents. If you run too fast or too slow, you don't get the proper action and the mill is ineffective. Rose's The Metallurgy of Gold discusses the theory of ball mills and will provide the needed information for you to determine the speed for one of your design.

I'm of the opinion, having run one successfully, that anything you add to the interior in the way of lifting devices will simply deter the proper action. It's very important for the falling balls to land on the objects being crushed. If you have lifting devices, they'll deflect the balls or other objects you've chosen to do the work. Processing time will be drastically prolonged. Much easier to run at the right speed and not include the lifters. Also, the larger the balls, the faster the initial reduction, but small balls will take the material to a fine powder quicker. It's not a bad idea to have a charge of mixed sizes so you get good action at both ends of the spectrum. That worked very well for the mill in the picture.

Be advised. They are VERY noisy! If you live in a sub-division, unless you build an extremely small one, you will get complaints from neighbors. I had to wear ear protection when running this one. Conversation in the room was impossible.

As the size of a ball mill diminishes, it will lose it's effectiveness. You might keep that in mind as you determine an ideal size for your needs.

Harold

i use a manual rock crusher to crush things, so far no problems... you can get a pretty fine dust out of it then i further process it with a hand held crusher to get some of the smaller chunks left over - if i try to crush everything to fine powder at once i just get everything packed - plus crushing small amounts at a time makes it easier to spot stuff

I was in touch with "Action Mining Supply" in Sandy, OR today about this. They sell a impact mill for reducing ore to -400. I asked about processing scrap and Mike suggested mulching the boards to -1/2" then processing them with a impact mill. I did a Google on mulch and found a photo and crude plans of one made from a discarded lawn mower that I thought was interesting and might be modified for this use.

I would post a PDF of it but I have had little sucess doing that in the past. I anyone more proficient at this posting thing than I am (probably most everyone) would like to post the JPG please pm me and I'll send it to you to share here.

Rainmaker

shoot away

OK please don't yell at me but maybe i can help.

Here's an idea i had but never got around to.
Needle guns , any one know what they are ?
short order, they are hell at what they are designed for.
They run on air.
these are expensive on the link i will post but, you can get a cheap one that will do the trick for about $ 50- $ 75.
strikes per minute 2000-6000.
depending on the needle size 14-40 needles. let see 6000 SPM @ 40 needles =
that 240,000 individual strikes per minute.
That should get you where you want to be. lol
Kick it around you will have to perfect it i just recommend it.
Let me know what you think.
http://www.michiganpneumatic.com/customer/mipnto/pdf/scalers.pdf

Thanks gentlemen.
Ralph

Needle guns are quite powerful. I used to use them to remove slag from ingots. They might break up IC's. The problem is to confine the material so it doesn't fly all over. Your chamber might just work. Not a bad idea.

All depends on where the (needle) scaler discharges spent air, doesn't it?

If it's towards the needles, not only would it create one hell of a dusty mess, you'd contaminate the charge with oil from the properly lubricated air source.

Harold

I was thinking of using a blender

lmills148 said:

I was thinking of using a blender

Click to expand...

Not a bad idea, actually :wink:

Although, unless it's a blender from hell, I doubt it would last for long. Maybe if you fabricated a cutom heavy duty impeller, but the motor would surely give out before long.

Now, if you were to build one from scratch, with super human components, then we're on to something......

Fever

This is a crusher I use to make glass frit. It also works well for ceramic caps, rubber type silver caps etc. anything you can put in it.
Its body is 2" galvinized pipe 12" long with cap to fit.
The ramrod is 1" galvinized pipe 18" long with cap on one or both ends.
You put parts in bodies cap, then screw on body holding body verticaly.
Insert ramrod hold vertically, jack up & down to crush parts.
Works very well but is a lot of work.
You can make larger crusher to crush processers,just buy larger pipe.
Can also use black iron gas pipe but costs more.
Glass workers also make frit by throwing chunks of glass in kitchen type electric trash disposals, might work for plastic or rubber coated parts just to expose to acid. Maybe it would work on ceramic caps, but might be too hard on blades.

Put about 1/2 oz small parts in cap or less.

You will create some dust out of top when crushing,might want to wear at least a dustmask or doing outside is even better!
I hope my description is not so simple that I offend anyone!

Do you have a photo of the scrap after it's crushed so we can see how fine it gets?

Nice setup.

Steve

Although, unless it's a blender from hell, I doubt it would last for long. Maybe if you fabricated a cutom heavy duty impeller, but the motor would surely give out before long.

Are they really that hard?

Maybe something like this.
http://www.silverson.com/USA/Products/LabMixers.cfm

Hi new here.

Just thought I would throw in a couple links to some home made ballmills.

http://www.unitednuclear.com/ballmill.htm

And here.
http://www.vk2zay.net/article.php/36

Dgoldboy