Tractor Tire Rock Polisher

Tractor Tire Rock Polisher ROCK PICKERS Rock Pickers 27-2-44 For the past two years, Don and Margene Emme, O'Neill, Nebraska, have supplemented their trucking business by buying field stones, cleaning them up, and reselling them for landscaping. Rocks that aren't sold are warehoused, so the Nebraska couple has a large supply on hand. "We are always looking for ways to market our inventory of rocks," says Emme. After looking at a small rock polisher their grandson got for Christmas last year, it struck them that larger polished rocks might be of interest to some people. "I measured his rock polisher and multiplied the dimensions to build our prototype machine," Emme says. As soon as he started working on it he realized he had stumbled onto an entire new marketing opportunity The first challenge was coming up with a tumbling chamber big enough to hold large rocks. Emme got the idea of using a 25-in. tire off an industrial front-end loader. He sealed off the open sides of the tire with steel plate and added hubs at the center. The plate on one side hinges open to add and remove rocks. He built a frame for the tire tumbler out of 2 by 4 steel tubing. He tried several different ways of powering the polisher, including a tractor pto, but settled on a 3 hp, 220-volt electric motor with a variable speed pulley. A V-belt from the pulley drives a gearbox he salvaged from a silo unloader. A no. 60 roller chain from a sprocket on the gearbox turns a 28-in. sprocket mounted on one side of the tumbler. "I've found a reduction of about 56 to 1 seems to work best," he says. "Right now, I have it geared so the tumbler runs at about 4 rpm's. I'm still experimenting to see what speed is best." Emme loaded a 300-lb. rock into the tumbler to try it out and found that the one big rock was a bit too much. He backed off to a batch of 85-lb. rocks, and smaller. Emme says he's still experimenting (he just finished building the machine in February of this year) and will probably make a few more changes before it's perfected. But he already has one order for a quantity of polished fieldstones to be used around a fireplace. He polishes the rocks with a mixture of sawdust, bits of plastic, sand, and steel slag, adding a bit of sawdust at the end to clean them up. He says the machine is very quiet when running. "You just hear muffled thumps as the rocks bump into each other inside the tire," he says. It takes a couple hundred hours to polish a large batch of rocks. "It's encouraging to know people like the idea," he says. "Once I get this going, I'm probably going to buy a rock saw so I'll be able to cut the polished rocks, too." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Don and Margene Emme, 49447 872nd Rd., O'Neill, Neb. 68763 (ph 402 336-3381).

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