[TheForge] Re: Coal crusher

[Mike Spencer]

> Looks like kind of like a variation on a meat grinder.

Right, but without the cutters or other attachments on the output end.

> Do you get a lot of oversized coal?

No.  But when I moved shop I had leftovers of several lots of coal.  I
have one bin that's mostly fines with these big lumps in it.  I've
long since forgotten why I happened to have that particular stuff.

> I have a friend that fell into a large supply of industrial coke,
> for free...

The possibility of getting a couple of tons of industrial coke cheap
prompted the crusher.  I had half a dozen chunks to try.  It crushed
up okay but in the forge, it burned hot at the base of the fire but
not higher up where you'd normally put the iron.  I think I crushed it
too fine.  That's said to be a problem with blast furnaces, viz. if
the coke is too fine or if it's not strong enough and is crushed down
to small pieces by the weight of the ore/scrap, the furnace doesn't
heat right.  Air doesn't penetrate the charge.  Sounds like what
happened in my test fire.

I'm hoping to get sack or two for a better test.  If I do, I'll pull
the small-diameter pipe off the crusher and I should get mostly nut
size with some a bit smaller and some fines.

> ...he devised a crusher that forced it through a heavy grate with a
> tamper sort of thing.

I thought about that.  I have a pie press [1] that goes through the
right motions but it doesn't have bearings to take that kind of
beating.  Peggy suggested using the 300# air hammer just to taunt
me. :-)


- Mike



[1] Right, pie press.  I blew 20 bucks on it at a junk yard just so I
    could take it home and see what it was.  It seems to have been an
    idea of the aluminum company (Kaiser Dial-O-Matic) back in the
    early 50s, I guess as a way to introduce those disposable foil pie
    pans.  The operator pops a pie pan into an electrically heated
    tray shaped like a pie pan, tosses in a ball of pie dough and
    turns the manual crank.  An electrically heated matching die comes
    down and squidges the dough into a thin shell.  Pop out the man
    and do another.  Has a rotating head (like a turret lathe?) to
    accommodate up to three different dies.  The lower die is
    quick-change, too.  Upped pie shell production from a few an hour
    to a couple of hundred hundred.  Now an antique because that stuff
    is now fully automated.

    - Proud Pie Press Owner

-- 
Michael Spencer                  Nova Scotia, Canada       .~. 
                                                           /V\ 
mspencer at tallships.ca                                     /( )\
http://home.tallships.ca/mspencer/                        ^^-^^