The fine ground which passes through the holes in the cylinder, together with a plentiful current of water, flows into the washing pans. These pans are of iron, 14 feet in diameter, furnished with ten arms each having six or seven teeth. The teeth are so set as to form a spiral, so that when the arms revolve the teeth carry the heavy deposit to the outer rim of the pan, while the lighter material passes towards the centre and is carried from the pan by the flow of water. The heavy deposit contains the diamonds. It remains on the bottom of the pan and near its outer rim. This deposit is drawn off every twelve hours by means of a broad slot in the bottom of the pan. The average quantity of blue ground passed through each pan is from 400 to 450 loads in ten hours. The deposit left in each pan after putting the above number of loads through amounts to three or four loads, which go to the pulsator for further concentration.
About 14 per cent of all the ground sent to the depositing floors is too hard to weather, so of late years crushing and concentrating plant has been erected to deal effectually with the hard lumps, thus saving the great lock-up of capital consequent on letting them lie on the floor a year or two.
The hard lumps being hauled to the upper part of the machine, are tipped into bins, whence they pass to crushing rollers which so reduce them that they will pass through a ring two inches in diameter. The coarse powder is screened through revolving cylinders having ½-inch and 1¼-inch perforations. The stuff passing through the finer holes goes to the finishing mill, while the coarser stuff goes to smaller crushers. Before the coarse lumps are re-crushed they pass over revolving picking tables, where any specially large diamonds are rescued, thus preventing the risk of breakage. From the picking tables the ground is scraped automatically into two sets of rolls, and the pulverised product screened again and graded into three sizes. The finest size, passing a ½-inch screen, goes to the washing pans, and the two coarser sizes to jigs. Large diamonds which have been separated from their envelope of blue are retained in the jig. The ground still holding the smaller diamonds passes out of the end of the jig and then through a series of rolls, screens, and jigs until the diamantiferous gravel is drawn from the bottom jigs into locked trucks running on tramways to the pulsator for further concentration and sorting.
The pulsator is an ingeniously designed but somewhat complicated machine for dealing with the diamantiferous gravel already reduced one hundred times from the blue ground, the pulsator still further concentrating it till the gravel is rich enough to enable the stones to be picked out by hand. The value of the diamonds in a load of original blue ground being about 30s., the gravel sent to the pulsator from the pans, reduced a hundredfold, is worth £150 a load. Stuff of this value must not be exposed to risk of peculation.
The locked trucks are hoisted by a cage to a platform, where they are unlocked and their contents fed into a shoot leading to a cylinder covered with steel sieving with holes from 1/16 to ⅝ of an inch in diameter. The five sizes which pass through the cylinder flow upon a combination of jigs, termed at the mines the pulsators. The bottoms of the jigs are covered with screens, or sieving, the meshes of which are a little larger than the holes in the revolving cylinder immediately at the back of them.
Over each screen is spread a layer of bullets to prevent the rich deposit from passing too rapidly through the screens. The jigs themselves are stationary, but from below an intermittent stream of water passes in rapid pulsations with an up and down movement. This pulsation keeps the diamantiferous gravel constantly moving—“alive” is the expressive word used—and tends to sort out the constituents roughly according to their specific gravity, the heavier particles working to the bottom and the lighter material washing off by the flow of water and passing into trucks, whence it is carried to the tailings heap. The heavier portions, by the up and down wash of the water, gradually work their way under the bullets and pass through the screens into pointed boxes, whence the heavy concentrates are drawn off upon endless belts. These convey their precious load to small elevators by means of which the concentrates are lifted into hoppers from which they are fed upon shaking tables.
FIG. 9. SORTING CONCENTRATES FOR DIAMONDS. DE BEERS.