Originally Posted by
jiffy117
Quite the back story for sure.
What type of Ball Mill do you use? This would be for bentonite powdering rather than refining
As brasscatcher mentioned I built the mill from scraps.
The drum is about 20 inches in diameter by perhaps 30 inches long heavy wall pipe from the oil field. After weldig an end plate to the rear of the drum on dead centre welded an end for the universal drive to which I have made a drive shaft attached to a gear reducer 50:1.
On the gear reducer input shaft a v-belt pulley aproximatley 8 inch in diameter with a 4 inch on the motor / 1725 rpm. For ball I used 3 inch round steel shafting cut into lengths of 3 inches. The drum is cradled onto solid rubber wheels.
On the discharge end after capping cut a rectangular hole, to close the hole cut plate having a slightly larger size then welded three bolts to the plate, then made a rubber gasket the same size as the plate cutting holes for the welded bolts.
You have to angle the plate to get it inside the drum, position it then place your strong backs onto the bolts previously welded to the door plate, once in the door is in its proper position you tighten up the nuts to secure the strong backs which are now pulling the larger inside plate against the inside of the plate welded to the drum.
Because of the large diameter of the drum I was able to compact the mill by mounting the motor under the drive shaft coming off the gear reducer, direction of rotation makes no difference..
I have put this mill for five years now, wore out one gear drive and recently replaced the electric motor, the original motor was a 1/3 hp I now have a 1 hp motor on the mill.
Also built a centrifuge that produces 500 G's but will not recover the fine powdered gold coming out of the ball mill, if you need to know how to economically recover the fine gold google "4 Au + 8 NaCN" otherwise this is a non topic.
Last year I purchased the filter plates and cloths from Watermark to build a press, my press will look similar to the one below.
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