Toro star rolling explained

[Seymour]

Not with Toro, but I do with the 'sprinkle spray' method of rolling.

 

Everything works better in bulk when it comes to rolling. This is my method, although note that it is not the only way to roll 'coreless stars'. Note that with the 300g starting mix you will easily get 10kg of stars, so scale down (or up!) according to your needs. However this method is great for bulk, but cutting small stars as cores makes much more sense to me for batches smaller than a few kilos, so for most people here.

 

I get a "small" quantity of star mix, perhaps 300g, and wet it until it is the right consistency to hold together when squeezed, but no more than that. This is granulated through a screen as if I'm making rough powder or polverone. This is placed in a star roller and tumbled.

 

Tiny increments of composition are added after small mists of water. Quantities added are small, and I like to give the stars extra time at this point to tumble and become uniformly wet before adding powder, and then to pick up the powder. It's a slow process.

 

Stars will stick together, and some stars will grow to 1/4" or even 1/2" while the rest of the stars are cores about a tenth this size. Until there is a good population of stars about 1/4" and the stars are pretty much uniformly nice spheres, I screen the cores, perhaps through a 1/4" screen, but maybe a smaller one, and all the big bits that decided to clump together or grow too big get granulated through about a 10 mesh and added back in to the roller as new 'cores'. This should be done multiple times during this phase.

 

Once the stars stop clumping you still have a few that insist on growing faster. At that point I screen them out and put them to one side to re add to the main batch when the other stars have fought up, instead of granulating them as I did earlier.

 

You now have cores made from the star mix, and have therefore made stars with no cores (except ones you made from star mix). Dry them, and continue rolling with them another day.

 

You can do this with Toro, but you have to use excruciatingly thin slurry, and dry them after each step, which includes the initial granulation. It's not worthwhile in my opinion, for with the slurry so thin, the steps are many in number, and each step with cores so small is difficult. There is much to be said for using small cut stars as cores for Toro.

Edited December 17, 2015 by Seymour

[lloyd]

Seymore,

I've long advocated "coreless" stars (not 'scoreless', because mine have 'scored' pretty well! <G>).

 

I make them by a different method: I put dry comp in the roller, then set a sprayer to make very coarse droplets, and spritz a good quantity of those drops on the spinning dry comp.

 

The result is lots of tiny cores, without the bother of their sticking together and forming lumps.

 

Once I've seen that there are a fair portion of them there, I'll screen them out of the dry composition, and proceed again until I have enough.

 

They're quite delicate when new, because they haven't yet had the advantage of thorough wetting and the 'real' sticking of the binder. But once I have enough of them, they go back for an additional (very careful) wetting with a fine spray, so as to further compact and bind them.

 

Last, I dry them thoroughly before the first attempt to roll them up further. Because they are so small, it takes only a half-hour or so in the sun (spread thinly on screens or kraft paper) to get them completely dry.

 

Then they're treated like any other core material would be.

 

Lloyd

[Seymour]

Ha ha! I've edited my typo now

 

Your method does sound quicker, Lloyd, I should try it out some day

[Mumbles]

I've done basically exactly what Lloyd described. It's quite effective to make cores or a granulated composition. You have to kind of go in with a leap of faith. Using a continuous spray, like from a garden sprayer, and adding in most of the water you want as the dry composition tumbles has always given me better uniformity than spraying and letting it roll, then adding more droplets, etc. You have to kind of have a ball park of how much you need to add from the get go. It varies composition to composition, but IIRC you want 70-90mL of water per pound of composition. Let this roll for maybe 10 minutes and see where you're at.

 

It's not that bad. Worst case scenario, you just have to screen granulate the composition if you mess it up.

[zan89]

Thanks for useful tips!

Edited December 18, 2015 by zan89

[schroedinger]

Zan you cnan also use pumped stars as cores. E.g. 3 lr 4 mm star.

[zan89]

Zan you cnan also use pumped stars as cores. E.g. 3 lr 4 mm star.

 

I do it like this. i use 3 or 5mm pumped with Zmuro gang pump

Edited December 18, 2015 by zan89