Ballmill, Suggestions?

Originally Posted by johnnybeegoods

pulverizing scrap for separation.

Is there a poor man's way to pulverize scrap--other than putting it in a trash can and smashing it to bits with a sledgehammer. I'm trying to break up misc. plastic parts, electric plugs for instance, to quickly and cheaply seperate out aluminum and brass. It's not economical to spend hundreds on a ball mill or similar device for this purpose, and smashing the parts with a sledge hammer takes too long and is too much work. Surely, someone has developed something workable for this type of low-yield, low-profit seperation, right? Or, is the best solution simply to chuck these metal-ladden plastic parts into the shred pile and be done with it?

Olddude I would say no they would not do well. The walls are thin for the size and weight of the balls or rods I plan to use. It needs to be sealed tight as not to let any PM dust escape.

I am looking into precious metal recovery and perhaps refining. At this point I am reading, collecting, reading, building, and more reading!
I am very interested in this process! I have been reading day and night. When I'm not reading I am listening to it through text to speech .

I figure as I read and learn I will start building the basic equipment needed. A vapor hood is also on the drawing board, along with a scrubber.
This is going to be a lot of work and learning, but once you learn something no one can ever take it away from you.

Originally Posted by injunjoe

once you learn something no one can ever take it away from you.

I never really gave that much thought till now. Well put.

Joe have you looked this one over?? just curious, I know you've looked the gold refining forum over. That Steve off the gold forum has his own site, not sure if this is it or not, but he seems to be a real expert on refining gold.
http://www.goldnscrap.com/

By the way; does anyone (bigger e-cyclers) ever use this company??
http://www.electronicscrap.com/index.asp

Thanks for the link Mechanic. There are some very smart folks on the Gold Refining forum.

I find it interesting how complicated and dangerous it can be working with acids and such, yet there are a lot of simple questions being asked.
If someone can't figure out the simple stuff how will they ever proceed with the more complex operations?

I have been giving the gold recovery some thought. I am certain that I will not have an original idea so I looked to what others do to recover gold without using chemicals. Here's a link to a gold panning machine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=4rkhRzLFn6M

I know of other devices are used to seperate natural gold so why not do the same with electronic waste? I read one of High Voltages posts and took from it he uses hammer mills and a shaker table to seperate material by specific gravity. This takes me to where my thoughts are going: Doing the same process to recover copper, Al, lead/tin from the low grade boards that are easy and cheap to find.

Thanks for the original question and the kick start to my journey, Mike.

Good thinking Mike and good luck on your journey.

Than is neat little machine in that video Miked.

Though nice idea, i doubt it's abilities to effectively 'pan' all of the metals from fine (i of what i assume to be) e-scrap dust...
A ball mill is a good start in the recovery effort in any case, as long as you manage to operate it at optinum (speed, grinding media, feed size, duration, dry/wet) you will be able to reduce size down to few microns.

The only question is, will this panning machine could handle that material? I'd have to see it to believe it... and i would still assay the pulp, just in case.
The metalic concentrates will have to go through a chemical process of some kind eventually, after all, the majority of its content is copper and other base metals.

I could walk you through the process if you decide to Pursuit with this process.

There are many more process that may come in handy and are very much depended on your skills and setup of your operation.

Miked

The commercial process usually involve crushing down to about 0.5-1", ferrous and non-ferrous are seperated by magnets and eddy current and sent to a smelter.
The organics may be incinirated then smelted as is, or reduced in size even more and go trough flotation seperation (shaker table).

The horrible truth is, that recovring and refining metals by your self from e-scrap, will require you to run several hundreds Kilo's per day in an extremly efficient process to make it worth while.

There are sveral components though, that are richer then others and are easily seperated from boards. Those components can be sold outright or processed by yourself reletevly easy.
You can see in my website few examples of them under electronic scrap.