The cost of smelting with five furnaces in operation, each treating three charges per day, was approximately as follows:
On the basis of 6.25 tons of wet ore, this would be $4.65 per ton. The actual cost in seven consecutive months of 1900 was as follows: Labor, $1.98 per ton; coal, $1.86; flux and supplies, $0.51; blacksmithing and repairs, $0.39; miscellaneous, $0,017; total, $4.757. If the cost of smelting the gray slag be reckoned at $8 per ton, and the proportion of gray slag be reckoned at 0.25 ton per ton of galena concentrate, the total cost of treatment of the latter comes to about $6.75 per ton of wet charge, or about $7 per ton of dry charge. This cost could be materially reduced in a larger and more perfectly designed plant.
The practice at Desloge did not compare unfavorably, either in respect to metal extracted or in smelting cost, with the roast-reduction method of smelting or the Scotch hearth method, as carried out in the plants of similar capacity and approximately the same date of construction, smelting the same class of ore, but the larger and more recent plants in the vicinity of St. Louis could offer sufficiently better terms to make it advisable to close down the Desloge plant and ship the ore to them. One of the drawbacks of the reverberatory method of smelting was the necessity of shipping away the gray slag, the quantity of that product made in a small plant being insufficient to warrant the operation of an independent shaft furnace.