Hey guys my name is Jason with Mount Baker Mining and Metals and today we're
gonna be running another cool sample I wanted to share with you guys so come on
in and take a look. This is some copper chops that we got from one of our
international customers and so he sent up several different samples, this is
everyone's favorite comm wire here and it's been through his grinder, his
granulator, but there's still copper wire in there that has insulation on it and
so we're gonna run it through our hair and mill and onto the shaker table and
see if we can recover some of that copper wire. The next one here is some
real fine number-two wire. It looks like it might be their lamp
cord or insulated number-two extension cords stuff like that real fine hair
wire. So we're going to run that through the system as well. This is a sample of
some probably high recovery number two wire that has already been through his
air table and there's still some real fine copper hair wires in there, so we're
gonna run that through the hammer mill to wet it on the shaker table to recover
that fine copper that his air table is missed. Here's a sample of the same
material only with the copper in it, this hasn't been through his air table yet, so
we can maybe eliminate a step for him and run it all through our system and he
won't use his air table anymore. This is some number two wire as well and I'm not
quite sure what it's from but the insulation is really thick and it's
really heavy and so you can see there's some paper and some fluff in there so
we're gonna run that through the system. And the last one here is some of this
real fine hair wire, single strand stuff. This hasn't been through his table yet
but you can see there's a lot of pieces that haven't been fully liberated the
copper is still inside the insulation so we're gonna try and break all that up
and recover the copper out of this one. And lastly,
we have a sample of clip ends from printed circuit boards and there's not a
lot of copper in here but there's a bunch of little gold conductors at the
end of some of these pieces. And on one side it's soldered on the other side
it's a little gold contactor of some kind. So we're gonna run these through
the system as well and trying to recover some of that gold and other precious
metals in those boards. So here's the system we're gonna be using today and
this is our demo system, this is a sixteen by twelve hammer mill that's a
gooseneck Inlet on it so I'm gonna feed the material in here on the inlet. Water
is fed up into the back of the hammer mill to help flush everything down and
through the system. The hammer mill has a quarter inch punch plate screen and
those blades that we've shown in some of our previous videos so they're not
hammers it's more blades on the system. It's going to come down out of the
trough here into our aluminum distribution trough onto our shaker
table. The table has gated valves here so you can adjust the feed rate on to the
shaker table. The light plastic fluff and all the paper is going to come down into
our number-four into the waste. The copper is going to get caught in these
grooves run across under the concentration water bar and into the
number1 and number2 port, and then the number three we're gonna see what
happens there I suspect there might be a little bit of plastic mixed in and maybe
some of the longer hair wires may get captured in number three that we can
then rerun through the system and collect copper.
So we made a little bit of a change for running the trims and board edges and
stuff. We use this screen instead of that quarter inch punch plate because there
weren't any components on the boards that were reusing so we wanted to make
sure we got them ground up real fine on the first pass and that way we didn't
have to recirculate anything through the hammer mill again. And this is about a
one millimeter slot here and we've taken our welder and we've just welded beads
all the way around the screen and so you end up with about a one-inch long by one
millimeter wide slot and that seemed to work really really well for liberating
all the copper out of the boards and a little bit of gold that was on the
board's because there were no components on it. We're trying a little bit of
experiment here and we've put these light plastic sheets over the shaker
tabletop because some of the fine copper was actually floating on the water
surface and so we've added these plastic sheets to break the surface tension and
force the copper wire underwater which then allows it to come across into the
number one and number two on the shaker table.
And you can see here when I lift up the plastic sheet the copper actually floats
on the surface of the water down into the number three and so the plastic
sheet we used actually did a really good job of breaking that surface tension and
allowing all that metal to come over into the number one and number two.
Here's the inside of our hammer mill with the hood taken off, and I wanted to
show you guys the screen we used on the wire samples. This is a quarter-inch
punch plate hole and the screen wraps all the way around both sides of the
mill. And this is the rotor, and for our PCB and wire samples we use these blades.
And there are 3/8 AR 400 steel and we plows cut them out to have these points
on them and so as the hammer mill rotates around this way the blades catch
and grab the boards and the wire and drag them down into the mill and crush
them up. And so this is a little bit different than our hammer mills for ore, but
wanted to give you guys a shot of the inside and show you the screen we used
on the wire. Here's the results from our copper wire across the shaker table and
after talking with the customer we learned that there was actually two
different types of samples here. And so I wanted to go through and talk about each
one, this is actually copper wire there are three or four buckets of this
material that was actually run through their single shaft shredder and had not
been granulated yet. And, as you can see, we got pretty clean copper wire but the
issue was is they had that comm wire sample in there and each one of these
little installations of comm wire have copper wire still inside of them so even
though the copper wire came across clean if there's any copper wire that's still
insulated it will come across the shaker table into the number one. Conversely,
they sent a sample of material that had gone through their granulator and this
is the material here once it had been fully liberated through their granulator
and you can see it's 100% clean copper. The shaker table actually did a really
really good job on this material because the copper wire is small enough and it's
fully liberated so we ended up with 100% clean copper from directly from the
granulator. So thanks for watching our video on processing copper wire chops
and unpopulated PCB trim through our shaker table and hammer mill. I think it went
really well, I was really impressed with how clean the copper came out with
granulated wire and also how much copper there was on the shaker table, I don't
think I've ever seen that much metal on shaker table before. So hope you guys
enjoyed the video, if you have any questions or comments please let us know,
you can call or email which is in the description below. And thanks for
watching we'll see on the next video.