Rubber and Stones

BackwardsMan

I have a large amount of small pieces of rubber that are mixed together with a large amount of small stones. I need a way of separating them other than just going through it all by hand which looks like it will take days.... or years

I thought about hiring a large skip and filling it with water, with the idea that the rubber would float and the stones would sink. However, I tested this in the bath tub and the rubber did not float either. If anyone knows any liquids with a higher density than water that a cheap and safe to use that would be a great help.

Any other ideas would be welcome too.

Thanks

Thomas_S_Hunterson

Salt water perhaps??

More expensive would be glycerol, although that might dissolve the rubber, I'm not terribly sure

Alun

If you could 'decant' the stuff into a smaller container bit by bit you could try vibrating the whole thing, using an old electric sander mechanism for instance. The heavier particles (stones) should separate out to the bottom of the container.

I'm intrigued .. is this a hypothetical question, or a real one, and if real, how on earth did this weird mixture come to be?

tak

Do both phases have much the same size range or not ?

If not maybe you could set up a screening sieve mesh that would give you partial separation at least.

A riffle table would be the ideal thing but you're not likely to find them too handy to you !
Is there a recycler of mixed materials around your present base ?
Mosey round if there is and look at the machinery there.
You'd be surprised at the things that can be separated.

A variation of Alun's idea would be a sort of large flat centrifuge, home-made from wood & steel rebar and turned by a strong elec motor.

breadmonkey

You don't say that you need both consituents as end products so I say set the whole thing on fire!:p Seriously though, this is quite interesting. Roughly what mass of this crap are we talking about?

Spyral

sounds like the stuf they put down at horse racing tracks and in gardens.. recycled rubber bits

tak

Or else it's a case of BackwardsMan taking the pee out of a science forum.
There's too much of this going on in some forums - not least P & C and Eng - where some dulamú poses a far-out problem, gets a few of us sorting it out and then disappears.