Ball Mill Machines

[Racer X]

Anyone use em? Any advice or practical experience? I am interested in them and the screens. Could use some technichal advise.

[Greymatter Glass]

Yeah...

ball mills are VERY simple to rig up and great to make a huge amount of powder from coarse to talc fine. You can get milling balls through most industrial and chemical suppliers. mcmaster-carr and United Nuclear both come to mind off the top of my mind:

www.mcmaster.com and www.unitednuclear.com for their web sites. United Nuclear has all kinds of fun stuff.

After that you can either build a sorting tower with stacking boxes of decending screen size as you go down, or a water column grader. Either way it's good to work wet.

I dunno how much powder (frit, I assume) you're looking at making, but you can get pretty elaborate in your sorting. The simple quick way is to get glaze screens from a ceramics supplier. a large screen is $25-60 depending on mesh and brand. Water columns are good for rapidly sorting HUGE amounts of material. shaker boxes are a good intermediate solution - imagine 5-10 boxes that stack on one another and interlock... basiclly. or you can do slide in screen... whatever. mcmaster-carr sells screen (look under hardware cloth)

Anyways.... hope that helps.

-Doug

[smutboy420]

Also try looking for prospecting supplies or gold prospecting equipment for ball mills.

Prospecters use them to grind up there black sands to recover the fine flour gold from it.
But the prospecting equipt. tends to be pretty heavy duty and is not as high priced as a lab supply place for the same thing.

[Greymatter Glass]

I would just build a ball mill from a plastic 1 gallon mayo jar (or similar HDPE container) and a small motor. Look around there are lots of plans for free online.

[Racer X]

I can't make anything Doug. Not even glass, I pay someone else to do that for me.

Thanks alot on the advise. You and I are on the same page with alot of that info.

[jiminyrootkit]

well....i been thinking about doin this for a long time, just didn't know what they were called
....was going to use 2" rod rollers inside and had been trying to figure out how to make em flip.....would the hard lead balls flake after prolonged use? not magnetically attractable either, right? mebbe steel ball bearings...*back to lab*

[Greymatter Glass]

For glass you want steel.

Antimony lead is for mixing and grinding flamable/explosive materials. The lead balls wont spark.

On hard materials like glass they would get ground up.

chrome or stainless balls are best.

...what was that about rod rollers? inside? huh?

-Doug

[jiminyrootkit]

i was thinkin like a rock polisher of sorts, drum style, with 2-3 pieces of 2" steel rod cut 1/2 in short of the length of the drum inside to crush, couple pieces of 1" angle welded to the inside of the drum to stir it....this ball idea sounds better.....how big of balls are used? and i think all steel would be the way to go for glass, container and all.....for extractability of anything that does wear off (with microwave magnets)
-f

[glassman]

I don't use ball machines much these days but this info may be helpful.
You can buy a small afforable ball mill if you look under pyrotechnics (pyrocreations .com is one source). As the material flys through the air it passes through the media and is ground down by the friction forces, not by the impacts.

So if crushing high density media works better than low density (like you pushing through a crowd, the less dense one are moved by you, you have to turn sideways when you run into the dense ones). Don't use steel balls or chrome balls unless you want to clean up the metal debries with magnets. Consider ceramic balls like alumina or zirconia. The size of the ball (or other shape) depends on the size of the glass material you put in, usually you want it fairly small when you start.

If polishing your prices then use polishing type media.

[boxfan willy]

Always use a steel mill for the grinding. Don't forget to use a rare earth magnet to get all the iron out. Otherwise, the iron will oxidize into rust and create some real compatability problems. Found this one out the hard way. Props to Henry for helping me figure this out.

Peace,
boxfan

[Bent]

Those sites F-in' rock

[themoch]

what is a good way to get the iron out with magnets on a large batch? i've done it with small batches, but recently i tried it with larger batches and it just isn't easy.

[Greymatter Glass]

I wouldn't use zircon or ceramic spheres for glass. All ball mediums wear down over time and getting something that's not glass compatible in your frit will ruin the batch. With steel balls you can get the contamination out with a magnet, but if you get zircon ceramic dust in your frit... well that's basiclly kiln dust.

Anyways.... best way to get any contamination out is once you've got your final grinding done to whatever size you want put in 2 or 3 1/2" round neo-boron (rare earth) magnets in the mill and run it a while. You can put the magnets in small plastic baggies to make them eiaser to clean.

Anyways...since magnets are a great way to get the metal balls out of the frit anyways, it's really not that big a deal (or process).

If you have a very large batch you can make a magnet tray and pour the frit across a tray of magnets.... any way ya go, magnets are great to clean up the iron from frit.

-Doug

[smutboy420]

My dad has a neat trick that he uses for removing magnetic sands from gold ore. That could apply here.
Put a magnet in a film vial or a pill vile. then it will pick up the metal bits and they will stick to the bottom of the film vial. then you just shake it and the stuff falls off the bottom of the vial when the magnet pulls away from the bottom. Basicly a small flick of the wrist does it.

Maybe seal up a film vial or 2 with some epoxie so it don't break open in the mill and throw it right in.

The also is a machien for seperatin large amounts of magnetic sands That has a plastic wheel with a magnet in side it and the sands pour over the wheel. The magetic sand sticks to the wheel and goes to the other side where the magnit is farther away from the wheel at that point and it hits a scraper bar that makes it fall off the wheel in to a hopper and the non magnetic stuff falls down on the front side and does not stick to the wheel.
My dads got a blue print of one. that one of his friends made. It would be a great thing for commershial scall frit and powder making.

[Char]

Hubby built me a ball mill and all we got out of it was fine powder and a lot of glass that didn't do much. We are using ceramic balls and it seems not to work too well. We've switched to heating and quenching to make the frit that I need for my work. May-be switching to the metal balls to help break-up the pieces that are still not separated now that I'm reading all of this. I can post picts of the ball mill tomorrow if anyone is interested.

[themoch]

i am, please post what you can

[Greymatter Glass]

yeah.... just to throw this out there.....

If you have iron balls in a mill you don't want the magnets in with them.... it kinda screws things up if the balls are sticking to each other instead of falling on the glass. Best thing is to get any iron bits out after you grind the glass.


And.. um... smaller ball mills are much better at making fine powders rather than coarse frit. The larger the ball the larger your frit size should be, in theory, but really it's a process of just watching what's going on and not letting the mill run all night unattended. Also, you have to start with glass that's already somewhat crushed up. If you start with all differnt sized chunks then they just get worn down to powder before the larger chunks break up into "frit". Anyways, you'll have to experiment with starting material, ball size, and how much you put in, and how fast you run the mill and all that.

Char, post the pics :)

-Doug

[Char]

Sorry I didn't read this until I got home. I'll drag the camera to the shop and shoot the ball mill and post it tomorrow.

[Firekist]

i'm guessing this would work just as well with glass as with silicon, but..:
i make a distilled water slurry of the fine grit/powder before running over a magnet.. it keeps the dust down, and you can automate a dripping bucket/hose to flow over the magnet very slowly.. this ensures that everything passes right along the magnet (covered magnet, as has been suggested)

using distilled water keeps you from getting impurites in your finished product, after you dry it out. you'll get mineral deposits from most non-distilled water.. mineral deposits/film makes glass boil more easily.

(z--seth)

[christopher]

using distilled water keeps you from getting impurites in your finished product, after you dry it out. you'll get mineral deposits from most non-distilled water.. mineral deposits/film makes glass boil more easily.

(z--seth)

Yeah, if you use regular water and try it, you'll look like you have a piece that you specially manufactured for mineral deposits. . .

Being tipsy and typing sucksx. . . goodnight. . .

[Char]

Ok, here goes with the pictures I hope. The first is a side shot. I'm turning a one gallon container with the glass in it with ceramic balls inside to brake them up. The second is a shot head on and the the third is a shot of what kind of junk that I get out of it. We have been trying to break up my scrap sheet glass up into frit. Steve cuts it down so it's not so large and what we've been getting out of it is just as large pieces with a fine sprinkle of powder. We're tumbling it at a rate that should "waterfall" the ceramic balls as we've been seeing on the Haguchi video on pate de verre. We're going to try it with the quenched stuff just to see if it will break that up so we don't have to pound that. Any ideas?

[somewhere]

Your profesional choice would be BICO there is a Chipmunk which handles 400lbs an hour and even bigger is the Badger. These machines are designed to handle glass and are no joke either is the price. These are crushers not ball mills.

I know of some people that use ball mills but it takes a long time and your set-up has to be big enough to do the damage your looking for.

Screen vibrating and separating equipment can be bought from Gilson. Dirty dusty job to say the least. Then there is the washing and drying process.

Garbage disposals actually work well and mine has lasted for years. We run it thru with water and screen and sort with water. Very little mess and I have never experienced contamination unless something like sand slipped into the mix. Most disposals are stainless steel so they don't rust and the blades in ours show very little wear. We do heat and quench larger chunks of cullet but things like boro rod shorts go right in.
my only disclaimer is not all disposals are of the same quality so life spans may vary as well as blade quality.

oh yea then there's rolling mills. I also know of people using these but as with most glass process there are many ways to skin that cat. Good Luck and don't forget how cheap frit is. Sometimes we way over engineer and spend our time building instead of creating.:bangHead:

BTW: didn't we used to have a spell check? LOL

[themoch]

yeah, if you use FireFox it's gone, because they switched to an external M$ IE plugin.