Show ANACONDA OPPER COPPER C special to the boston commercial butte mont july 22 the anaconda copper company will build a new copper refinery at great falls for which preliminary plans and estimates have been made president B B thayer and vice president C P kelley have looked over the ground at great palls falls and have confirmed the report ss as to the intentions of the company the new refinery is expected to handle about pounds of the blister cop per produced monthly by the washoe smelter at anaconda and which is now being shipped to the perth amboy refinery it was first contemplated to build an extension to the latter plant but later it was deemed economical to build a refinery at great falls which will cost about this with other improvements being made by the anaconda company at great falls and anaconda calls for the expenditure of about the leaching plant now under construction at the washoe smelter with the acid plant recently completed will cost about work on the leaching plant is being pushed and it is expected that it will be ready for operations by december it will dispose of the tailings after the methods of extracting the copper have been used timbers have been set and buildings for the leaching plant are being erected the plant will handle 2000 tons of material daily the roasting furnaces have been ordered from the eastern manufacturers but the settling tanks will be built here the roundtable round table slime plant which has been in operation since the middle of march is doing its work splendidly and is recovering about pounds of copper in concentrates monthly the washoe slimes contain about 22 per cent copper and the plant recovers about 54 per cent being about twenty two pounds of copper to the ton the supply of slimes is daily being added to and will keep the plant running at its present rate for many years adding to the annual output of the anaconda company about pounds of copper which heretofore has been regarded as lost it is claimed that the cost of this copper including all charges is 51 cents per pound the waste from the slime plant still carries a lot of copper and an oil flotation process is being installed to treat this waste and experiment on the slimes themselves for the purpose of determining the better method of treatment one of the furnaces at the washoe smelter which was changed and fitted up with the new pulverized coal feeding system has been in use for two weeks and is working very satisfactorily for the change it was necessary to build a large addition to the buildings one addition feet was built to house the crusher and dryer and the mill for pulverizing is a structure there is storage room for tons of coal which is weighed and dumped into a coal crusher which reduces the fuel to inch cubes and finer the crushed coal being discharged upon a 24 inch belt conveyor convey orp driven by 4 an electromagnetic electro magnetic pulley which removes all iron particles as they pass over it discharging them into a separate compartment compart part ment the coal from which the foreign material has been separated passes into an elevator from which it is fed into a dryer this is a huge incline cylinder through which the coal passes in about twenty minutes driving out all the moisture except a minute residue amounting to not more than one half of I 1 per cent from the dryer the coal is carried by another elevator to a storage bin of eighty tons capacity in front of a five roll mill in this mill the coal is pulverized so fine that 85 per cent of it will pass through a mesh sieve some idea of the extreme fineness of the coal may be gathered from the fact that ordinary flour is bolted through cloth that would correspond to a 90 mesh sieve and is therefore more than twice as coarse as the coal dust used in the new system from the roll mill the fuel is taken up by air suction to a vacuum separator and there is deposited on screw conveyors which carry it to the furnace the verber atory is fed at the firing end from five hoppers the pulverized coal being blown into the furnace with nine ounce air pressure from a fan it is simply a dust cloud blown into the chamber the dust hanging suspended in the air to catch fire practically as a flaming gas it eliminates the old fire boxes with all stoking and grating doing away with the loss of coal that resulted from the stirring up of the old grashl fashioned boned fuel A vast increase in the ratio of efficiency is realized through the quicker and more complete combustion some years ago experiments were made with pulverized coal at some of the reduction works in mexico but were not successful chiefly because the pulverization was not fine enough lately the system has been tried at copper cliff ontario with satisfactory results the successful results of the one furnace at the means that the others will be remodelled remodeller remodel led at once it is planned to increase the plant to handle to tons of pulverized coal daily requiring about six of the mills beside other crushers and dryers B B thayer president of the anaconda company who is in montana on his semiannual tour of inspection says the anaconda will continue its operations at the present rate unless local labor troubles force a shut down out here in the west the people have no idea of the conditions that exist in the east he said here in butte blitte which has had the best situation in the country the recent labor trouble has had quite an effect As far as we are concerned we hope sincerely that the trouble will not come to the point that will necessitate a shut down we are trying to keep out of it entirely and let the labor forces settle their own troubles the company will keep things booming right along if we are not forced into the trouble of course the price of copper is low A short time ago a little demand sprang up and the price advanced but the spurt was short lived as the demand fell off again we know that the supply of copper on hand is not enough to last a month let business pick up and get a good start and you will see such a boom in the copper industry that every producer will exert himself to get out every pound of copper that can be produced although several of the important producers of the anaconda company are closed for repairs it is declared by officers of the company that there has been no material reduction in the output and none has been contemplated in the development of the ella mine on the east side the anaconda company is taking out several cars of silver ore per day good progress is being made in shaft sinking on the tropic development work will be resumed on the old greenleaf property on the extreme eastern edge of the district upon which work was stopped some years ago after af ter a long crosscut had been run through the ground at a depth of 1000 feet and nothing of value found it is proposed to sink the shaft deeper at the extreme western edge of the developed district the company is still engaged in un watering the old nettie mine |