Hi, my name’s Jason with Mount Baker Mining & Metal and today I wanted to show off some
of our new products, this machine is for grinding oyster shells, and it was commissioned by
one of the largest shellfish producers in the state.
And so I wanted to walk you through the machine, show you how it works, talk a little bit about
the shell and how it grinds, and we’ll talk about the end product
and what it’s used for.
So this the feed side of the machine.
You can dump a whole skid steer bucket of oyster shells into the hopper.
There’s a cleated belt that drags the shell up and feeds into a 16 inch by 12 inch hammer
mill.
Okay, we’re on the other side of the machine now, and this is the top of the cleated conveyor
belt, that drags the shell out of the hopper.
It comes down into the hammer mill here, this is a 16 inch by 12 inch hammer mill, run by
a 15-horse electric motor.
The shell is crushed, it goes through the three-quarter inch punch-plate screen, and
out this discharge conveyor.
And it can either be discharged into a pile, a trailer, or into a small dump truck.
So here’s some of the shell we’re going to be crushing today.
This is processed shell, so it’s been sitting out, they’ve cleaned it, there’s even
some big clusters like this where a couple shells stick together.
But this is the fairly easy stuff to crush.
There’s some other stuff called green shell, which is fresh right out of the salt water.
There are bigger clumps, have some junk on it, some rocks with it.
So we’re going to try both types today and show you how each one crushes.
Here’s a look at the green shell that we crushed.
You can get an idea for the size that comes out of there.
And over on the edge here, there some of the bigger pieces.
So it’s all three-quarter inch minus, and there’s quite a bit that’s less than three-quarter.
And we can crush one of these blue totes in about 10 minutes.
I think these weigh about five or six hundred pounds a piece, so that gives you an idea
of the throughput.
And this green shell was quite a bit different than the processed shell.
It had big chunks of wood in it, rocks, sand, the oyster shells were all slimy and clumped
together.
But it didn’t seem to matter in the hammer mill, it took it just fine and crushed it
all down, and discharged it to the conveyor belt.
So even the green shell crushed just great through the system.
And this is all the processed oyster shell.
And it’s used for all kinds of stuff, like chicken feed, soil amendments, fertilizer,
landscaping mulch, bocce ball courts of all things.
So that’s kind of what the product looks like, and again, when you change those screen
sizes, either bigger or smaller, you can get a little bit finer grind or coarser grind.
So thanks for watching our video, and if you’re in the shellfish processing industry we’d
like to hear from you.
And it’s just one more unusual thing we’ve crushed in our machinery.
So thanks again for watching and we’ll see you in our next video