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Using a lathe for ball milling experiments


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Posted

Well I got my lathe here a few days ago..and something I thought of doing was experimenting with ball mill speeds. By nature, it has a massive number of speeds (18), and a motor suited ideally for heavy loads (2hp) running for long durations of time.

 

Any thoughts on using it to find the ideal ball mill speed with average media for milling BP? I would set up one support in the chuck, and another (with bearings) in the toolpost.

 

Any guesses on the ideal RPM?

Posted

Well, Passfire has a ball mill speed calculator, but it's easy enough to just use your ears. Start slow, listen to how the media behaves. Find the speed at which the continuous, rattling flow of the media turns into a sort of skipping noise. Grind, pause, grind, pause. That is too fast, and any faster than that, and the media will be more or less pinned and not do such a good job.

 

I don't think it's that big of a deal, really. If you are not at the perfect speed, it'll just take longer, say 8 hours instead of 6.

 

Use caution, many chemicals will corrode and wreck your nice new lathe.

Posted

Alright, I guess I'll just stick to using my lathe for turning tooling and the likes.

 

It doesn't matter with how long I mill my BP for anyway.. Softer than felt, and floats like smoke..

  • 4 years later...
Posted (edited)

Or you could just calculate the optimal speed...

 

Critical speed = 265.45 / sqrt(Jar inner diameter - Media diameter)

Optimal speed = .65 * Critical speed

 

Source: Mumbles @

http://www.amateurpyro.com/forums/topic/6424-ball-mill-what-distance-between-rods/?do=findComment&comment=83049

 

Edit: Sorry, just saw the date this was posted. Maybe it will be useful to someone still.

Edited by BurritoBandito
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