Paddle Wheel Muller or Lugged Wheel Muller

Some follow-up on my paddle wheel muller. I've put about 1000 pounds of sand through it now. I really really like the way it performs. I definitely see both improvement in speed of mulling and reduction of lumps of previously-used green sand. It takes about 1/2 the time of the prior setup and sand lumpiness is significantly better. How that would generalize to other users and their mullers is a good question. I'll grant that it is a design design that may seem a bit counterintuitive, but it works well. Why do I think it works well? I think that the paddles do crush lumps both as the end of the paddle rotates near the floor of the muller and I also think sand "trapped" between the adjoining paddles is compressed some and that likely collapses lumps. It also mixes the sand rapidly and does not plow at all.

FWIW,
Denis

 

Thanks for the reference to Moulder's Friend- after a rather extensive Google search yesterday revealed almost nothing except their old address in Dallas City IL and this post, I was surprised. No images, no youtube videos, no service parts/catalogs. Another piece of American industrial history seemingly vanished. I would ask one favor, if you indeed have such machines could you post a picture or two? I started this as a favor to a friend to show her where I started in the industry and how we prepared the sand.
Thanks!

 

Yeah I kind of figured when I replied to an old thread that I didn't have much of a chance of getting a response. About the only other things I found were back from 2010 on other forums. It seems like the Moulder's Friend company and machine must be long forgotten except by me

 

Well first off the unit was not a Muller per se. Imagine a great big steel tined brush two feet in diameter 6 ft long that rides along on skinny tractor tires. You lay out your (premixed) Olivine or petrobond in a winrow, wet it down and then run the brush cutter through it so it mixes, aerates and gets it all prepared. It does a less effective job of bonding the Bentonite to the actual sand grain than a muller does, but it does a great job of fluffing it all up and hydrating/ mixing everything

 

There's a video of a small Korean foundry where the sand was prepared with a rototiller and a snowblower, I wonder if that would be similar:

 

Wow...amazing ingenuity.