Coalpail.com Forum

This year I bought Lehigh rice from my local farm store. I unloaded it with a 4" grain auger stuck down in the trailer and then into my bin. Primitive system but it worked. I've got a solid plan for next time which I'll describe below. While unloading the auger very suddenly came to a halt. I manually turned the auger by the belt pulley backwards and out came a rock that had wedged in between the flight and the housing. This rock did not come from Lehigh by the way. It came from the area adjacent to the coal bunker at the farm store. Anyway I felt lucky it was found at this point because the EFM auger would not have tolerated this rock very well I'm sure.

Next year I'm going to build a new tailgate for my dump trailer with a small gate to dump coal right into an auger hopper. It occurred to me however that maybe I could incorporate a screening into this process. It would have to be a large enough mesh not to slow the rice coal but small enough to catch any rocks. Anyone screening their rice coal for foreign objects? If so what are you using? Hardware cloth comes to mind but the mesh would have to be just right.

This is the plan for next year. The auger discharge will be in the bin feed pipe which is 4" pvc and the business end of the auger will be on the ground in a hopper. I'll back the trailer up to it and open the gate at a rate that synchronizes with the auger speed, etc. So I'm thinking cover the auger and hopper with hardware cloth. No sense reinventing the wheel if someone has any experience or advice, I'd love to hear it.

I had put a wire mesh on top of my EFM auger hopper to make sure that no rocks or anything big could get into the EFM auger & shear a pin. The mesh had 1/2" square holes that the rice could pass thru.... BUT, even just pouring a 30# bucket on the mesh would cause the coal to pile up.I had to take my hand & stir thru the pile to encourage the coal to drop thru the mesh.Maybe 3/4" mesh would work without the coal piling up on it.
I have taken the mesh off & just watch for bigger stuff as i fill my hopper.I had gotten the wire mesh from a farm feed store.

Thanks windy. That's good to know. I'll have to experiment with some different sized mesh I guess to see what will work without piling up.

ck you're taking me back to my early years with coal, when I first learned that the local coal yard might sometimes deliver pieces of their concrete coal bin mixed with the bulk coal. My first response was to put chicken wire over my bin, so the chute would dump on the wire. This worked fine, but I was feeding the stoker from an EFM 700, which has a larger diameter auger pipe than a 520 and can more easily handle somewhat oversized pieces.

At some point I got into more "complex" tasks, like sifting out fines and splitting mixed coal into larger and smaller sizes. IIRC hardware cloth of an appropriate size always worked pretty well. To address the backup issue windy mentioned I used vibration (i.e., tapping on the cloth). For a 520 auger I'd be hesitant to go bigger than 1/2" on the cloth unless the backups are really bad.

Mike

I wouldn't put it on the auger, assuming you have a barrel put a screen on top of the barrel. Use a screen size that will block peaish sized coal.

They shouldn't be there but there is lot's of ways the larger pieces can make it into the smaller coal. Winter time is prime time for that, a piece of nut freezes to the loader bucket and ends up in the rice. The ritual every time I went into to load in the winter was the loader guy showing me the inside and bottom of the bucket before he started scooping coal. One in five time there would be something frozen in it.

No I went with the sloped bin to the EFM auger. It easily held 4 tons and appears it would hold 5 1/2.

i used to screen the coal going into the efm. the carpet fed rice stoves it's not as important.