Here’s some of the stuff we’re going to be running today. These are transformers,
we have a bunch of different sizes here. And what we’re going to be doing is we’re
going to put them through the hammer mill with a ½ inch screen. All these little steel
plates are going to break apart, and the copper windings are going to be blown apart as well,
so we separate all the metal. The paper and the varnish and plastic is going to separate
as well. Once it comes out of the hammer mill, it’ll run up a conveyor, under a mag belt,
pull the steel plates out, and then it’ll fall down through a zig-zag, and it’s going
to suck all the paper, plastic, and fluff out, and we’ll have clean copper at the
bottom. These weigh anywhere from a couple pounds, this could be out of a microwave or
something, up to, this one weighs 14 pounds, it comes out of the big light ballasts you
see hanging in big warehouses, & shops, & stuff. So there’s a whole range of sizes and weights
here and we’ll see what happens when we run it through the hammer mill.
[Grinding noises]
We’re done with our test run, so we’ll
come over and take a look at the steel first. This is what the mag belt pulled out. You
can see it’s really, really clean. I don’t see any copper wire in any of this. So we
got really good separation.
We’ll go over here and take a look at the copper portion now, and we did it in two steps.
We did the small transformers first, and here’s a look at one of the small transformers for
scale. And what we found is that the small transformers have really fine wire in it.
The zig-zag did a pretty good job of getting the paper out of the wire. We were having
a problem with some of the insulated wire, just like this stuff hanging off, we didn’t
clip any of it off. The hammer mill doesn’t strip the insulation, so this is heavy enough
to fall through with the copper wire. Here’s a close up look of the small transformers.
And we ran a few bigger ones in there too, so you can see some bigger copper. It’s
pretty clean, most of the coloration you see in there is the insulated wire that has some
copper in it. But when we ran this, we wanted to make sure we didn’t suck up any of the
fine copper wire with the fluff and the varnish.
So here’s the 3 horsepower dust collector. We’ll look in the bottom bag here, this
is where all the fluff, varnish, and plastic went, and you can see it’s really pretty
clean. Every once in a while there’s a little piece of copper wire in there, it probably
got caught up on a piece of fluff. There’s some in there I think you can see. But the
overall weight of the bag is hardly anything, so I don’t think we lost any copper at all,
maybe a couple percent at most. But there’s no reason you couldn’t reprocess this, either
through a granulator, and then over an air table, or even a wet table, and get the remaining
copper out if you had enough of it.
So here’s what we found with the bigger transformers. I busted this one up a little
bit, so you can see. The wire in this is pretty good size wire, pretty heavy gauge, and this
is what it looks like when it comes out of the hammer mill all cleaned. And I think this
is actually probably number one, because of its size, and we had the same problem, we
didn’t clip the wires off the transformers, so the insulated copper still comes through,
and every once in a while you’ll get a heavier piece of plastic. The thing I want to try
next time, is the wire so heavy gauge that I could really increase the sucker, the air
velocity in the zig-zag, and I could probably, if I couldn’t suck these out, I’d be surprised
it separated them, but we could get a bit more of this fluff out, some of this heavier
plastic on the bigger transformers would suck out without any copper loss.
So we’re still in the R&D phase, the testing phase, but I think these are really good results,
and I’ll be interested to hear what you think of this.
So that’ll wrap up this video. And like I said earlier, we’re still in the R&D phase
of this thing, trying to figure out exactly the best way to proceed, and how to get a
clean copper product out the bottom, so you guys can sell it and make more money. There’s
a limit to what this size hammer mill can take, this is 24” by 16” hammer mill,
and these 14 or 15 pound transformers may just be a little bit too big for running production.
They do okay, but if you’re going to be running day-in, day-out, you may want to reduce
that to maybe an 8 or 10 pound maximum transformer. We do have a larger hammer mill in the works,
so I’ll be really interested to hear from you guys. How big of transformers do you need
to process, and then we can build the equipment accordingly. Is 15 pound big enough? Do you
need to do 25-pound transformers? I’m sure everyone will be a little bit different.
Appreciate your feedback, appreciate you guys watching the videos. We have fun making the
equipment, and look forward to hearing from you guys & seeing you on the next video. Thanks
for watching.