David is joined by John Greene from FL Sales Inc. to discuss sand reclaimers in the foundry industry.
About this segment of Blackbird TV
Guest: John Greene, President, FL Sales Inc.. To learn more about our guest, visit FLSales.com, or call 440-498-8484.
Recorded: September 28, 2020
Published: May 19, 2021
Segment transcript
John Greene, FL Sales, Cleveland, Ohio. Thanks for your help with this. I have a foundry question for you. What’s a sand reclaimer and what does it do? Well, it depends on what you’re reclaiming. The two basic types are what they call a mechanical reclaimer and a thermal reclaimer and what you want to do is after you’ve made your mold and you poured your hot metal you have some metal that’s infused into the sand grains you’ve got your. Depending on the process you used. You have catalyst resins that have that are attached to the sand grain and you can’t just use it over and over again because what happens, it’s—without getting too complicated—what happens is the resin builds up. The catalyst builds up and you get different qualities when you retake that sand and make it in the mold. So what people do is they reclaim the sand. And to mechanically reclaim sand, what they do is—the method I’m most familiar with is—they’ll take the sand and they’ll blow it by air, up to an impingement plate. The impingement plate will take and break the material off the sand and the heavier material will flow down the lighter material will go up dust collection. It’s a real simple explanation, but then your sand is cleaner. So this sand is something that was—in the term of art—it was in a flask and it was used in forming a mold. So you’ve got this shape that you’re making right and the sand goes around that and then you get the shape out of there. So you’ve got this void. But if you just had regular sand it would collapse on itself. So these these additives in these binders that they put into the sand help that’s and retain its shape, so that when you pour the molten metal in, it stays like the part that you wanted, right? Correct, but, and the thing is, you take and reuse that sand over and over again. It goes through the system and comes back and reuse it. So the more catalyst and build up you have on it, it changes the properties the next time. And the third time it changes even more so you have to get uniform properties each time you come in. How many times can you do that? To a pound, of ton, a gallon of sand? You’re always adding new sand. You’re always taking out what are called fines, which are when the sand breaks up and it becomes too fine to use. That’s a constant process, and in cases, this stand is used for years. It could be 10 or 20 years. And this stuff that you pull out is that a hazardous waste? Depends on what you’re pouring and like a byproduct of brass, is lead. You get lead in the sand. So yes, in that case. In steel foundries you get heavy metals in the dust, so that’s bad. Iron foundries typically don’t have much of a problem. It all depends on what you’re using the process, where they’re using the green sand shell, sand, nobake, sand, or, you know, a resin type. And there’s a lot of different processes, ways to do it. So the answer is yes and no. Depends on which which one and what type of foundry. Fabulous all good information for our viewers. John Greene, FL Sales, Cleveland, Ohio. Thanks for your time. You got it. Thank you, David.