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2) The pipe with what looks like a ring gear on it. What was that? Did that pipe turn somehow?
Thanks for the always splendid TRs!
The ring gear as well as the races on either side of it ("bands" riding on rollers) caught my eye, as well. Looks like a motor or a belt-driven gear would have been turning the "pipe". The rig looks like a rod mill although the chute and what appears to be a heating apparatus on the uphill side mystifies me. A rod mill is a steel or iron cylinder containing many long hardened steel rods. Chunks of raw ore and some water are fed by gravity into the upper end of the cylinder and a power supply and gearing rotate the ore and the rods. As they rotate, the rods come crashing down upon the ore, crushing it to finer and finer size. I understand that rod mills, ball mills, and for certain stamp mills made quite the racket at the old mine/mill sites.
My mining experience was always in finding the darn stuff (orebodies) rather than knowing how to process ore, so milling, concentrating, and smelting or retorting in the case of mercury has always been a "black box" thing for me.
Great looking pics and the old article from just a year after I was born was terrific!
Foy
I was doing research on this just as you two were posting. Good eyes and great question. I'll add this information to our blog post. It is a Gould Rotary Kiln Furnace for melting and then condensing mercury. It was asbestos and brick lined and rotated, powered by a Model A Ford engine.
From the Desert Magazine article -
"Equipped with a 30-ton Gould rotary kiln furnace, the present plant transforms raw ore into molten quick-silver in 30 minutes or less, and is capable of handling 25 to 32 tons of concentrates in a 24-hour shift. Costing $65,000 to install, a mill of this type is economical to operate and re-covers from 95 to 98 percent of the quicksilver, said Walter. Only one man to a shift is required to oversee its operation; the Model A Ford engine that revolves the brick-and-asbestos-lined rotary kiln burns only a gallon of gasoline per hour; and the heating unit, which maintains a temperature of 1200 to 1600 degrees F. in the roasting drum, burns from seven to nine gallons of diesel oil per ton of ore in the course of 24 hours operation.'
Further information I found on the Internet -
Gould Rotary Furnace and Condensing System