hey guys my name is jason with mount baker mining and metals and with the price of copper
being sky high right now we're getting a lot more interest in our scrap metal and recycling
equipment and so on today's video i'm going to take a couple samples of copper chops and just
the tailings from those the the plastic and the waste that they can't get any more copper out of
we're going to run on the shaker table here behind me and see if we can recover any more metal
out of the waste that they're just thrown away in the dump here's a look at our two samples
and this one has gone through screens and static precipitation and they've gotten they've used
all their tricks to get as much metal out of it as they can but there's still some little copper hair
wire and stuff in there this is the other sample and this is hasn't been screened or precipitated
or gone through the static separator or anything and so there should be more metal in this one
but we'll run them separate and see what we can get out of these two guys
here's our shaker table we're going to be running them on and i'm just going to feed them up here in
this distributor trough and i'm going to get them wet first and on a couple of my previous videos
i've run a sheet of very light plastic over the whole table to break the surface tension
and this one i'm going to do something a little bit different i'm going to put them in a bucket
i'm going to get them wet and i'm going to mix just a little bit of soap in with them
to break that surface tension and try and get all that stuff to sink down into the grooves here
and the metal the copper and probably aluminum is going to work their way up the copper should
come up under this water bar here and down into the number one and number two
the aluminum probably won't be able to make much up the ramp here and so it'll come down
into the number three middlings and then most of the plastic and everything is going to come down
to the number four all right guys i got a bucket of water here there's
about a gallon and a half or two gallons in here and this is just a a paint stirrer
so i'm going to mix it up with this we'll take our first sample here this is the coarser stuff
i'll dump i don't know half i'll start with half it's easier to mix if you go slow
when you're mixing with the water and then this is just some dish soap from my house and we'll get
some in there you don't want too much you don't want a bubble bath and i'm just going to mix it up
so i don't know if we'll be able to see anything but if i clear the suds away
there's nothing i mean there's a little bit of plastic that floats but
there's nothing floating on top the soap has broken all the surface tension
and uh any little residual oil on there is now gone and so all that should run real nice on the
shaker table so i'll get the rest of this mixed up into this bucket and then we'll start running
all right so i'm just gonna take our our slurry here
i'm going to put it in this distributor drop right here i don't even see it
but then i'll get it going and then we'll take a look at what's going on the
table
so i can get this on video i poured i don't know maybe a quarter of it onto the table and you can
see the massive amount of copper coming over we're still getting a little bit of copper floating here
you can see it floating down the table so let me see if i can find a little piece of plastic
to drape over the table but the copper is going to work its way down
the copper is going to work its way down the table on these grooves
and you can see some of it already coming out here into the number one and number
two so let me see if i can find something to break the rest of that surface tension
all right guys now i realize this is the absolute dumbest looking thing in the world but it works
really well so what i've taken i've taken just a garbage bag and i slid it in half
so the the plastic breaks the surface tension the water so anything that goes underneath has to sink
and once it sinks then it's down in the groove and it works way across
and then this sheet of plastic is clear so we can see what's going on over here
on the cleaning plane but this is super super light painters tarp it's it's like three mil
or two mil it's just super super light and all you're doing is breaking the surface tension so
the little bit of copper uh and oil or whatever's making it float sinks and breaks down below the
the surface the water and then it just works its way across down to the number one number two
so
all right now you can see that copper is all coming underneath
the sheet it's working its way across the table all the plastic
is bouncing out from underneath the sheet and some of it's floating some of this plastic is
is less dense the water so it floats a lot of it's sinking but there's no more floating copper
it's all just plastic coming out here
you can see up here you got quite a stream of copper coming out
all right so i got it tuned where you pretty much have
clean copper coming into the number one number two
there's a little bit of copper coming down here into the number three and this can just
be collected and re-run and then over here is it's all just floating plastic down to the number four
so like i say these things look really goofy but they work really well for breaking that surface
tension and then the copper can come clean over here in the number one and number two
and everything else can go off into its separate bins as waste
all right guys here's our number one and number two this is from the pre-screened fraction so
this is right out of the granulator and you know you can see if i can get it to focus here
it's pretty much pure copper there's some tinned wire in there that's the lighter gray stuff
and then obviously the copper hair wire
so that's the number one the number two actually had quite a bit more in it than the number one
and there's a little bit of contamination in here you can see there's a little bit of
aluminum flakes and a little bit of red insulation and a lot of that came over
when i brushed down the table i brushed down the table at the end but when you get open
when you get it kind of opened up there's there's still a little bit of contamination but
it's mostly metal some of the aluminum went in there
and it's really hard you know this sample weighed 24 pounds i think and so it's really hard to try
and get the table tuned up just right when you're only running 20 24 pounds if you had a couple tons
of the stuff and all day to play with it you could probably make a really really nice cut
i also expect that some of this insulation here like this one i can't grab it but
there's still copper in there there's still copper in the insulation that's why it came across
so there's the first sample i'll get the second sample run here
actually let's take a look at the number three as well so here's the number three and this is
mostly insulation there's still some copper in there you can see it
and again this is i think a table tuning issue where you had some copper going down
in the number three and i think you could take care of a lot of that by uh getting the
the plastic spread out just right and cut to the right shape
and also you know there's there's hardly any here you could take this and rerun it
with your second batch and get it cleaned up or you know your second run so you can really use
the midlings as uh kind of a catch all and then just rerun the five percent that comes in here
at the end of the day the next day or whatever so again this isn't lost copper it's just you gotta
reprocess it or get the table tuned up a little bit better all right one last thing here i just
weighed these two and took off the weight of the bucket and a little bit for the water but
there's a little over a pound of metal here and in 25 pounds um what's that about four percent
of the total weight so if you had oh boy if you had a ton of this stuff you'd have
what 80 pounds of metal left over i think i did that math right and so 80 pounds of copper at
354 bucks a pound is uh what 280 dollars 320 something like that a ton so that that probably
is worth going after at the current prices and you can run it really pretty fast on the table so
this is stuff right out of the granulator you can get rid of your static separator you can get
rid of your screens get it wet and put a little soap in with a mixer and then run it right on a
shaker table just like this one and get another several hundred dollars out of your tailings
this is the screen sample and this one's actually running quite a bit better i think the particles
are a little bit smaller and so they they can move with the water a little bit better but you can
see all the clean plastic coming down here i may have it tuned better as well i got a little bit
of plastic hanging over here but you can see the copper coming up underneath here into the number
two and clean copper coming down here to number one and and you can see through this plastic here
the copper is just working its way right down underneath the plastic
looks like there's quite a bit more aluminum flakes in this one
or this may have been a little bit of carryover from the last sample
because if this is screened i don't know if those aluminum
flakes are supposed to be in there or not but
there's all that copper coming down and we're catching it all right here the
number one and number two very very little is going over the edge here in number three
just coming down here you can see it piling up here in the corner
nice clean little ear wires
all right i just finished speeding all the screen sample and yeah it's just working so good
it's just really the copper is coming clean down here under the tarp
i don't see any copper at all going down to the number four
i got it tuned to where there's hardly anything coming down into the number three
and so we're getting really really good separation between the number four plastic waste junk
and just really really clean and it looks like all your aluminum is coming down the
second safety groove almost all of it so you could probably even split these two
run all this into the number one is clean and get a contaminated aluminum copper cut here
actually there's there's hardly any copper in that second groove
so there might be some more fine-tuning to do here but i think we're just throwing some
plastic on the table and running the sample it's working really really well
let's see what happens
look under there see then the copper starts to float a little bit
so we'll get it i'll get it wiped down here and cleaned off and we'll we'll take
a look at what we got in the number one and number two and then the number three as well
and here's our screened the sample that was screened number one and two
and again when i brushed the table down i got some aluminum contamination but
you can see there's the copper when you're when you see it run it's just all copper
so if you can run it all day without brushing it down
you can get i think 100 clean number two and then this one like we talked about maybe splitting
the first safety groove and the second safety groove would clean up some of that stuff
but still the the majority of this especially by weight is copper
and again a lot of that contamination came down from when i brushed it so let's take a look at
number three and then i'll try and get these two weighed and see how much copper we recovered
here's the number three and like i was mentioning i got a much better cut
between the number three and number four and i think what that did is it took a lot of
the plastic out so you have a significant amount more copper in this but a lot less volume i mean
there's not a cup and a half of stuff down there in the bottom compared to the first run we did
and so this would be real easy to take and and re-run back on the table
with your virgin material and get a lot of this copper out of here
but there's there's enough copper in this fraction you wanna you wanna go get it
so i just got these weighed and they weigh a little less than a pound
and the original sample weighed 24 pounds as well
so you're in that three and a three to four percent range of copper probably so it looks like
by screening and the electrostatic precipitate or whatever they got whatever their system is
it's recovering some copper but there's still a lot of copper a lot of metal left in the waste
that they're throwing out and uh and so this is again you're looking at that 200 300 a ton that
they're essentially throwing in the garbage that they could be recovering with the shaker table
all right guys thanks for watching our video and if you're interested in any more information on
the 4x8 shaker table behind me you can find more information on our website or you can find our
email contact in the description below so thanks for watching and we'll see on the next video