Industry Questions and Answers

  • What is a crusher?
    • A machine that reduces the size of raw feed material, such as rock, concrete, or asphalt.
  • What is a primary crusher?
    • A crusher that takes raw material and crushes it smaller. Taking virgin or recycled material that has been prepared to an acceptable size to be processed. Impactors and Jaws are commonly used as primary crushers.
  • What is a secondary crusher?
    • A crusher that takes crushed material from a primary crusher and reduces the product further. Typically, an impactor or a cone crusher is used as a secondary crusher.
  • What is a tertiary crusher?
    • A crusher that takes crushed (or screened material) from a secondary crusher and further reduces the material to a specific size. Cone crushers are often used in this application.
  • What is an impact crusher?
    • Impact crushers crush rock, concrete, and ore by an impact or hammering force. A high-speed rotor impacts material and flings it against stationary metal aprons. Impact crushers handle soft-medium rock but have higher reduction ratios than jaw crushers. Our 5256T, 4043T and 4043TR plants are all impact crushers.
  • What is a jaw crusher?
    • A jaw crusher uses heavy metal dies (one stationary and one moving) against it, to continually crush the material through compressive force in a chewing motion. This continues until material is sized and falls to the bottom of the crusher. Jaw crushers can handle very hard rock and ores. Our JXT and JHT plants are jaw crushers.
  • What is a cone crusher?
    • A cone crusher has a bell-shaped mantle that rotates in a circle and crushes material against the side wall (liners) of the crusher unit. When reduced to size, it falls out the bottom. Our CST and CXT plants are cone crushers.
  • What is a screening plant?
    • A machine used to size and sort raw or crushed materials.
  • How does screening work?
    • A screening machine is like a big sifter from a sandbox — it shakes up and down and “fine” material is screened out the bottom of the screen box. An unbalanced shaft is what creates the screen box shake and allows the equipment to separate material.
  • What is a primary screen?
    • A primary screen can accept and sort material that has not been preprocessed in any way. These can handle very large and heavy objects like boulders or concrete slabs. Our 516T, 107T, 107D and 77C plants are all primary screens.
  • What is a secondary screen?
    • A secondary screen sorts material that has been preprocessed by a crusher or primary screen. The material fed into these machines tends to be much smaller than what goes into a primary screen. Our 622TH, 514TS3 and 514TS plants are examples of secondary screens.
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