Jaw Crusher - Wallace, ID - Preserved Machines on Public Display on Waymarking.com

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Jaw Crusher - Wallace, ID

in Preserved Machines on Public Display

Posted by:  T0SHEA

11T E 580292 N 5258917

At the west end of the little town of Wallace is a great museum which will almost certainly appeal to the gearheads of the world. This is a open display and can be viewed at anytime free of change.

The "museum" is actually the Wallace Chamber of Commerce. At their site on River Road just south of I-90 they have put together displays of mining machinery, geology and rock displays, some sculpture and a memorial to the firefighters who lost their lives in the Great Fire of 1910, which burned several towns in northeast Washington, northern Idaho, and western Montana.

This, the second of the machines on display at the Chamber of Commerce is a jaw crusher, the first machine used in a multi step process to reduce pieces of ore to the smallest size reasonably possible. This was probably an early twentieth century machine.

Jaw Crusher

Many large pieces of mining equipment were made in Wallace. The manufacturing facility operated under a variety of names over the years. See separate text on the company nearby.

The result of blasting in ore production areas is chunks of rock that are frequently 4 inches or more across. To get the greatest metallurgical recovery it is necessary to pulverize the rock into the smallest size possible. This is normally accomplished in a multi-stepped process.

The first step is the jaw crusher, which utilizes a movable jaw being forced towards a fixed jaw with tremendous force. The chunks are reduced to gravel-size chunks less than one inch in diameter. From here, the gravel usually moves to a cone style crusher, which then breaks the chunks into an even smaller size. Those smaller chunks then move to a ball mill, where a huge rotating drum charged with large steel balls pulverizes the material into a talcum powder consistency. From there it moves to a flotation cell where chemicals are added to make the valuable product float to the surface attached to air bubbles, and the residue sinks to the bottom and most of it is used to fill in mined out areas.