Clay conveyor - GIFs

Clay conveyor.

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Previously:

https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...996#post176007
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...251#post172799
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...124#post149575
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...104#post157448
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...821#post129219
https://www.homemadetools.net/forum/...1660#post94342

OK, School me here. What am I looking at? The first stage of a pottery process or an exercise in futility? One of those conveyors very neatly meters out and then rows the clay then dumps it out on the ground?

I have never seen this process before, but I know a few few things from working clay over the years. I used to have students bring in a coffee can of "dirt" from their yard or where ever they going get it. One process in refining clay is to add lots of water to make a slurry. Dump some of the dirty into a 5 gallon plastic bucket. Add water then use a drywall mud mixer to or similar. Poured down a low sloped chute, the heavy material(gravel and sand) will fall out quickly. The remaining particles "sort" themselves by size, with lighter particles (topsoil, silt,etc,) flowing out the end. Most of the stuff in the middle was clay. Then you let the clay dry to the point you can use it.

That machinery reminds me of that process, starts with a slurry, gets drier, with each step. Being "dumped on the ground" may have been the last step before a loader picked it up to dump it into a hopper for extruding into products, (bricks, tiles, etc) or packaging for sale.

My guess

So this is actually the process of extracting only clay from raw materials then?

Yes, I believe that is what is happening.

I think you're right hemmjo. The first four videos show the machine that takes the raw clay slurry pumped in from the big PVC pipe and dewaters it by pressing it against a cloth/screen conveyor, breaks it up, and does it again to start the wedging process.

It'd be interesting to see the machine that makes the slurry. I'd guess it's probably a hammer mill, then a sprayer, and a giant propeller in a tank, maybe with some settling tanks?

They probably have to tear all that plumbing down to clean it out pretty often.

Some clays also develop additional viscosity and bond strength when worked aggressively.

My company is the worlds largest producer of one type of clay. We experimented with improving lower grades of clay by extruding through spinning rolls to add to its properties but eventually for us it was easier to just mine better clay and dilute it with lower grade to get just what we needed without selling too high a grade.