Our New "Old" Rock Crusher and Generator

(Overall Progress Reports)

(Videos of the Equipment)

Steve Deckard tosses the first Montana Agate into our Rock Crusher.

On October 18th, 2007 we started our new Rock Crusher for the first time.  It worked like a charm, and we anticipate a capacity somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 tons a day.

Steve Deckard engineered and assembled all the components for our Crusher He also built a control panel "from scratch" to run it.  Most of the components he used were salvaged from older equipment, some of it over 100 years old, including a 150 Amp Caterpillar generator used to power the Crusher.

With our new Rock Crusher, we anticipate creating large quantities of colorful Montana Agate beads in many shapes and sizes.  The Crusher will enable us to reduce wasted Montana Agate during the bead creating process, in addition to speeding up the process.  As you can see from the photos below - we also have a Pulverizer (Cone Crusher) on the opposite end of the trailer that supports our Rock Crusher.  The Pulverizer will be the second stage in the process of preparing our Montana Agate for creating beads.  Steve Deckard has been working to get the Crusher, Pulverizer (Cone Crusher), Sorter, and Generator up and running for several months, and has put in a lot of time and effort into this project.  The Generator Control panel alone contains over $1,500.00 in parts, and was specially constructed by Steve for this project.

In the photo to the right Steve Deckard explains the operation of the Rock Pulverizer, built by The Denver Fire Clay Company.  Steve explained that the Pulverizer was built some 100 years ago, and is more correctly called a "Cone Crusher".  Our Rock Sorter is almost ready, and we will post some photos and video of it in operation soon. (Videos of the Equipment are here)