Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and today I wanted to
do a little video showcasing our four by eight shaker table and talk about some of
the uses and some of the features of our table that differentiates it from other
tables, give you some instructional and operational guidelines on it, and talk
about the different uses we've seen our shaker table being used for. So we're
going to go through all that, so let's start with the shaker tabletop itself.
Here's the feed end of the shaker table, and this aluminum distributor trough is
where the material would be fed into. The water bar will wet the material in the
trough, and these gate valves can be adjusted to make sure the flow of
material is even on to the shaker table. The shaker tabletop is made out of EPDM
rubber and we cut grooves into the rubber to reduce the turbulence on the
tabletop and capture that really really dense material. There's a couple of
things that are unique about our shaker table. One is there are two flat sections
of the shaker table and then in the middle there is a ramp that actually
separates the dense material from the lighter gang. So here is where the
tailings would flow down into the tailings trough, this is a flat plane.
DStarting about here running diagonally at 45 degrees down the shaker table and
ending about here is a ramp that we build into the shaker tabletop and it's
about a quarter inch distance from the top to the bottom and this allows the
dense material to stay in the grooves and come up the ramp but the light
material, the quartz or plastic or any other light and less dense material
stops here at the end of these grooves and can't make it up the ramp and it
they flow down into the tailings trough. Once the dense material is up here past
the ramp, there are no more grooves and that allows for the flat plateau up here
to clean the material, the water will wash any less dense material away, and
the gold or heavy metals will form a band right under this water bar, come
down into the number one or number two ports here on our shaker
table. At the at the edge of the shaker table, there are two grooves that run all
the way across, these are called our safety grooves and if there is any
material that reaches the edge of the shaker table, they're captured by these
safety grooves and comes across this way, we've seen some material that's round
like spheres sometimes will roll down and be caught by the safety grooves so
that's an important feature of our table as well. So one more thing about the
rubber itself, this is again EPDM rubber. It's torch down roofing that they use for
rooftops in all sorts of environments. We've had shaker tables running up in
the Yukon that have been snowed on and froze, we've had shaker tables running on
the equator in Africa and so the the shaker table top and the rubber is very
hardy, it's very chemical resistant, UV resistant and can be run across the
whole spectrum of conditions. Here's the number 4 port for our shaker table and
all the light material will wash its way across these grooves into the number 4
port, or the tailings port, which can be discharged to waste or to a classifier.
If there are dense materials that can't quite make it up the ramp such as
sulfides or some of your lighter base metals, they will form a band at the end
of these grooves here. It's on the ramp at this point, but once the material
comes out of these grooves, it can't climb the ramp and so it forms a band
all the way down here that runs into our number-3 port, sometimes called the
middlings or sometimes called the concentrates. And this will be a mid
range value, you can take this material and rerun it onto the shaker table to
further upgrade it or grind it finer and rerun it, but this is where some of the
the material will be captured that may have value but it may not be a high
enough grade. All right I wanted to talk a little bit about the mechanics of the
shaker table now. Our shaker table top is supported by four different sets of
springs and these are just steel sheet springs
that hold the shaker table top to the base. They're angled at about 15 degrees
and when the shaker table moves it forces the material to not only move
across the table towards the high-grade end, but also gives it a little throw up
and so you the force allows the material to hop down the grooves if they're
straight up and down nothing goes anywhere, it just goes back and forth. As you come
across the shaker table towards the high grade end or the cleaning plane, there's
another set of springs here. This is the water manifold that goes to
the water bars, and finally you come to the the drive mechanism for the shaker
table and we'll take this guard off here and so you can see the mechanism but
here's the push rod that connects the shaker table top to the drive mechanism
So let's take this guard off and I'll take a look at how it works. So we've
taken the guard off our drive mechanism here and I wanted to walk you through
the steps real quick and show you how easy this thing is and how simple it is.
This is a half horse electric motor and this can be either single-phase or
three-phase depending on your specs. It's run by a single belt onto a large
wheel here. There's a small eccentric shaft that is held up by two standard
bearings. This push rod connects the eccentric shaft to the shaker table and
as the shaft goes around, the shaker table goes forward and backward. It
operates at about 325 rpm and there's a few things that I want to note while
we're under here. There are a few things that are not adjustable in the shaker
table that I wanted to mention. One is the speed or the RPM that is constant at
325. You cannot adjust the throw or the shake of the shaker table those are all
taken care of by this eccentric shaft. And also with our shaker table there's
no bump or jerk or anything like that, it's a nice even cyclical movement and
again we're trying to keep the turbulence on the shaker table as low as
possible to capture all that fine gold or that dense
material. On the initial setup of the shaker table, you're going to need to
level the table and we're going to show you how to do that right now. So in line
with the grooves needs to be level across and the slope towards the
tailings trough should be a quarter inch per foot down sloping towards the
tailings trough so the material can flow with the water towards the tailings
trough. The adjustment on how to set that up is down here on the shaker table legs.
The shaker table legs are each slotted and there's two bolts that you loosen to
adjust the throw of the leg and in doing so you can adjust the level of the
shaker table. So we found that this is really the easiest way to adjust the
shaker table is you loosen the nuts on the legs on the sides you want to adjust,
you get a fulcrum and a lever and then it's easiest done with two people but
I'll show you the mechanism here. One person will press down on the lever when
the legs are loose they stay flat on the ground
while another person watches the level on the shaker table and when the level
shows level they tell the person to stop and then the bolts the nuts can be
tightened back up to hold the shaker table in place. So once the correct
position for the shaker tabletop has been attained, you can come back and
tighten up these nuts and
lock the shaker table in place. When I'm adjusting the shaker table, I like to
only tighten the top nut to start with so that you can easily adjust each leg
if you need to. When it's all level like you like it, come back and you can
tighten down the bottom nut to hold the shaker table in place. So in leveling the
shaker table these is where we found to do it is by spacing off about to half an
inch in two feet and then getting your level resting at two feet on that shim
and now we are level in this plane. And then checking to make sure that we're
still parallel in line with the grooves...
and when using a long level you want to make sure that you stay away from the
ramp because that'll throw off the slant of the shaker table. So we're well away
from the ramp, we're level in line with the grooves,
we're sloping down towards the tailing trough at a quarter inch per foot or
half an inch and two feet. So the shaker table is set up correctly and we found
that at these specifications the shaker table works great for all different
sorts of material such as gold ore, PCB material, copper chops... this is a really
optimal setting for pretty much any density separation. Most shaker tables
need to be bolted down to a concrete slab but ours does not. In this situation
we have the shaker table sitting on top of a piece of one-inch thick steel plate
and all the shaker table needs is enough weight to hold it down so it doesn't
vibrate when it's in operation. And this can be accomplished by putting sacks of
rocks on the frame of the shaker table, we've seen that done in a lot of rural
places and while we were in Kenya that's how we anchored the shaker table down.
You could tack it to a large piece of steel like shown here or you can bolt it
to a concrete slab if you have that available, there are four holes one in
each foot that you can bolt through an anchor bolt through to a concrete slab
if you're going to be working inside in in a warehouse or in a shop. So as long
as the shaker table can be anchored and held down to the floor and isn't
moving around its it can be operated pretty much anywhere that you need to
set up shaker table. So there are two water bars on the shaker table, one here
over the cleaning plane and one here over the distributor trough. And they're
made of PVC so they're very easy to replace if they get damaged or broken,
and the only adjustment on the water bars is these valves right here. And so
these valves can be adjusted to tune the amount of water on the shaker table both
for the distributor trough and for the cleaning plane. And what we found is the
shaker table it needs to be completely covered in water
there should be no dry spots no uneven spots with the water flow but you don't
need any more water than you need to do that. So if the shaker table is
completely covered with water and there's no rivers of water, the water is
nice and evenly distributed across the shaker table, but it's completely wet
that's really the optimal conditions for running the shaker table. So I can adjust
the water bars up and down by loosening this bolt. And for the high-grade end or
the cleaning end of the shaker table, because this table tilts down this way
this water bar is going to be need to be level so all the holes have about even
flow coming out of it which is going to mean that it's going to look high on
this side because this end of the shaker table is a little bit lower. The feed
water bar again needs to have fairly even water coming out of the holes all
the way across, but the important thing is looking at the shaker table top you
can see that the water flow is nice and even, there's hardly any turbulence on
the surface, the water is flowing down the ramp
towards the number three and number four port. The cleaning plane water bar is
tilted back just a little bit so that the streams of water are hitting high on
this little ramp here which allows the gold or the dense material to come up
here and make a line right at the bottom of this little ramp that we build into
the shaker tabletop. So you do not want your water bar out here because you'll
get little piles of gold or other dense material you want the water to be
spraying high up on this ridge here so that there's a nice even
flow of water all the way down to the number one port. It should take the water
about five to six seconds to go from the distributor trough down to the tailings
trough, so I have a little piece of grass we're going to test one, two, three, four,
five. So that's about just the right amount of water flow from one end of the
table to the other. And the table uses between five to seven US gallons a
minute which equates to about twenty to twenty five liters per minute of water
and the water can be recirculated over and over again if you captured it in a
tailings pond and clean the water sufficiently so there's not a bunch of
suspended solids in it. The water can be dirty or cloudy but as long as it
doesn't have any pudding like consistency on the shaker table you can
actually run fairly dirty water recirculated for the shaker table to
operate correctly. Now we're going to show a few clips of our shaker table
running various material that we've taken over the last couple of years.
We've run everything from gold ore to printed circuit boards, copper chops, cars
shredded material from recycling plants so the variation of material is quite a
lot and so we wanted to share a few clips with you of our shaker table
running
So all your gold is coming off this first groove, as soon as it gets off this
little sandbar or a black sand it's it's caught in in the groove it's gonna come
down this way. There's some other really heavy stuff the black sand that might be
where your pgms are it's coming down with the gold but by the time it gets
down here it's pretty much all clean gold. A little bit of black sand is going
to carry its way down into the number two
So what we've got here we've stopped the table in the middle of the process of
running the granulated copper chops and what we can see is a high percentage of
copper coming out of the top two long grooves working over toward the left
under the water bars. It's working extremely well
all the light materials washing down the table the copper is concentrating at the
end of the grooves and coming off the table. There's some other heavy metal that,
the fine stuff that's right at the leading edge that's probably a little
bit of brass and copper and maybe some steel. I have a magnet here we're gonna
check this stuff for steel...
and there's a little bit in there but very very little it's mostly non-ferrous
metal. I stopped feeding the table so you can get kind of a snapshot here where
the copper goes, the copper comes across the top grooves here, makes a fan down and
then works its way up the table this way. The number one and number two are almost
pure metal and the number three middlings will capture anything that
overflows into the third port. So thanks for watching our shaker table video,
we've been developing and producing shaker tables for over ten years now and
we're really happy with the product. And we have equipment in over 54 countries
currently and so we're really excited to develop the products more and get them
out to the people who need them. So thanks for watching our videos and we'll
see you on the next one.