Hi all, I'm trying to track down some plans,designs for building a little sand screening conveyor. I already have an old shaker hip screen, however I want to make a feeder conveyor with a hopper to make my operation more efficient. Anybody got any plans sitting around or any ideas of how to build cost effectively (Cheap!) and easily. Really looking forward to what ideas you guys have. Thanks
Looking at your other post it looks like you have a sand quarry in a river or I’m reading wrong. There will be a difference in how to handle / screen wet vs dry sand. Wet sand will clump up or bridge in a hopper and be harder to screen. If it's dry I would put it in a hopper with a belt so you can adjust the flow. If you set the screen over the second hopper at a slight angle the large stuff will work it's way off the end. You will need to put some kind of vibrator on the screen. The first hopper should hold at least a 3 buckets of material. The second hopper should hold at least a load of material. If you dealing with wet sand would be a pain unless you added more water to it. I'm not sure if this would work, but use a conveyer to feed a trommel that’s mounted over a send hopper. I would weld bolts to the inside of the trommel to help break up the sand as it spins. If there is rock in the sand I would use some welded bar over the first hopper to remove the larger stuff. We have had better luck with using hydrologic's for conveyers over electric with VFD's. To keep up the efficiency you will need to adjust the feed conveyer a few times a day or a few times an hour. We screen and wash everything from 6” rock to sand to get out the heavy minerals before returning it to the hole. More info would help. Sand wet or dry? What mesh size do you want to screen to? How big is the stuff you want to remove? How many yards an hour? If your in Townsville AU you might want to check to make sure you don't have any minerals in the sand that are worth good money. I'm not sure what the mineral rights are where your at. Are you going to do this for a few months or is this something you will use for years?
Sorry Gravelwasher, should've included a few more details. Yep got a sand quarry pulling out of a freshwater river. We screen dry sand only. I have a hip screen with a honda motor on it to shake it over a 10mm screen. At present I tip a bucket over the top of the screen a little at a time to get it to stay on the screen as long as possible, thereby getting as much as possible thru the screen. I then pick up the clean sand at the bottom of the screen. You can undoubtably see the inefficiency here that I'm trying to get away from. Our rejects are anything from 150mm-6 inch down to 10mm. I was thinking about building a conveyor, with a large hopper on it to feed the screen at a consistent rate. At present, when all is going well I can recover about 30-40 ton per hour of screened sand. This will be something I'll be working with for a long time. When I can get this working properly, I'll move onto the next stage , which is capturing and grading the rejects into different sizes. (There's more money in Aus in graded rock then there is in sand,however sand is the bread and butter, rock is the cream) I'm really chasing some specifications on how to build a conveyor,hopper setup. I have lots of rubber belt at my disposal. Any ideas of roller placements, motor location etc would be greatly appreciated if you've done that kind of thing before. I was planning on using a motor to run a sprocket and chain as opposed to hydraulics. Thanks for your time and knoweledge.
If your able to do 40 ton an hour like that then I would just add a feed hopper with some tubing over the top of it to get out the 3” + stuff depending on how much 3”+ in it. It also sounds like you would do fine without hydraulics’s, but would suggest a Variable-frequency drive for the conveyor feeding the screen. I don't have any conveyor blue prints that I know of, but will ask if we have anything I can post that will help you. When we were building our wash plant we had ours built and installed for us. In the USA under ground coal mines us a modular conveyor system so they can be built in place in a few hours under ground. I can not find good pics on how there built on line, but I will make a phone call on Monday and see if I can get some good pics and information.
Juice.... I think you'd be very happy designing a plant about like this one,,, it happens to be hydraulic, but to each his own.... the carrier rollers need to be on 4 foot centers, and the return rollers are needed only every 8 feet. I own one like this one pictured and has given me many years of good service. http://www.fabtec.net/proscreen.html