Tractor Mounted Jaw Crusher For Reducing Rock

I wonder if anyone here has experience running a small Jaw Crusher that could be attached to a tractor within the 10 to 30 horsepower range. I'm looking at buying some relatively rough land in the Philippines. It's made out of limestone and there are plenty of bits of it on the ground ranging between baseball and basketball size. I'd like to run many of them through a Crusher in order to make aggregate for road building and concrete work.

There are many areas where it would be very difficult or impossible to bring in any sort of dump truck, to deliver Rock, but a small tractor could advance slowly along a road that is being built out of the rock that is being crushed.

The Philippines seems to have plenty of small Kubota tractors in the appropriate size range, so it's just a matter of finding or ordering a crusher from China. So, my question is, has anyone here used a machine of that size? Do you have any idea how many tons or how many yards per hour you were able to produce?

Thank you. Any help would be appreciated.

I have never seen any that small, most start in the 80 HP range. You can look at FAE and see what they have though.

You can also make your own. I am looking at making my own rock crushers, but it will not be for moving along breaking rock as I go, but rather breaking ore. I was thinking more like a stamping mill then a jaw crusher though, but I have not ruled out a jaw crusher to feed the stamping mill. A check of "Homemade Rock Crushers" on youtube will give you plenty of ideas. Crushing rock is NOT a new idea.

911 mining has small kits you can buy, and will ship anywhere in the world...for a price (they are out of Canada). They have a small one, I think around 4 inches for $600, but have bigger sizes too.

As for operating a rock crusher, I have. The one I operated though was indeed a jaw crusher, but industrial sized as it had a 250 KW generator powering it!

I am a geologist and mining engineer. Never used a mini jaw crusher but if you get one I would be really interested in the results.
I might be able to suggest some things to help you crush rock more efficiently if you're interested (jaw width, how big a reduction in block size etc)

Thank you. I have seen suitable size units on YouTube, mostly in Asia. I think because of labor rates and the size of machinery they might be more common. YouTube has a few examples of people using them on a farm tractor. I won't be building anyting. I limit my Contraptions 2 things made of wood and simple alterations of existing tools. Something limited to level 2 MacGyver skills. I think Travis has level 5.

This unit is available brand new in China for 500 American. There's no way I'd try to build anything if I can simply spend $500 and get one. I guess I'll keep looking.

I've seen many big jaw Crushers at places that process gravel and blasted Rock. All have used a giant diesel or electric motor.

I've seen several videos with various size units, but they never talk about production levels.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5evRPYNUjsk

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7eKXIoDaLWo

I may have to contact some of the manufacturers. I also may find that plenty of them exist in the southern Philippines and buy something on the used market. I know they are processing  lots of rock, because I see truckload of it, mostly broken down to  suitable size for making hollow blocks.

I hope to use my machine to break down used concrete as well. It seems that most people have no means of dealing with this stuff, so if I had a machine like this on the back of a tractor, it's likely that my future brother-in-law could make some money processing material for others. The majority of people don't have a vehicle suitable to haul heavy materials like stone in concrete.

Labor rates are somewhere around $8 a day where I would be using this. So I wouldn't run it myself very often, other than when testing things out or working with a crew.

A big part of why I have chosen to move, is that I can get so much done, by employing people there.

So I don't need a machine that is super productive. I suppose a couple yards per hour might be enough.

It's likely that I will create a spot for my future brother-in-law to make hollow blocks. I could see having a crushing machine available so that customers can dump off unwanted rocks, when they pick up their  concrete blocks.

I've looked at several difficult pieces of land where I'd like to build on High Ground. In some cases, it would be a bit of an excavation process, making a suitable spot for the house. I'd like to be dug into the east side of a slope, to get out of the afternoon sun. Small excavations are often done by hand and the process produces plenty of rocks suitable for running through a Crusher.

There are about as many ways to crush rock as there are rocks, so you might not have to limit yourself to jaw crushers.

Granted impact and gyro/cone crushers tend to be more for reducing rock, but today I was looking at Arrastra Crushers. They come from antiquity, but work. Why use a tractor and fuel if $8 a day could employee a kid and his donkey instead? You do not have big rocks there so it is not going to take much to break them.

I was looking at crushing rock samples to have assayed, but my hand pounder was a lot of work and busted, so I thought of a better way to do it. I think I can use my drill press spin a Arrastra Crusher to make powder out of ore and see what it has for silver and gold. I'll just dump in the ore and let it spin overnight and see what I have in the moirning. Use what you got I say!

natasha todd wrote:I am a geologist and mining engineer. Never used a mini jaw crusher but if you get one I would be really interested in the results.
I might be able to suggest some things to help you crush rock more efficiently if you're interested (jaw width, how big a reduction in block size etc)

I might be interested in your help Natasha at some point.

I have been doing prospecting for the last 3 years, knowing they found gold in a stream downstream from my land. By map and pan I have chased the Placer Deposits up stream, but think I found the Hardrock. It is very promising samples with iron pyrite, galena or graphite (I cannot tell the difference), copper pyrite, garnet, and quartz. As I said, promising looking stuff.

I have to check the other side of the formation and see what that has, but it might help me connect the dots. If the bedrock maps are right, and the quartz holds up, and it assays well, it looks like a few acres of bedrock.

Yes that is a lot of IF's, but it could be a significant find. I live in a remote part of Maine, and we were farmers and loggers, and never had much inclination to drive an addit through a mountain.

I like the simplicity and relative safety of jaw crushers. They don't have a Million Parts. They also don't make the incredible noise that comes from a hammer mill. I've seen some rock crushing contraptions, that seemed to work fine, but I wonder how I would ever get it unclogged if it jammed up. It seems to be pretty straightforward with jaw crushers. And the noise isn't nearly as intense.

So if I can get one going at reasonable cost, that's really the way I want to go. I know that the videos don't always show worst-case scenarios, but it looks like they just keep chugging along at whatever speed they work at. If there is some way to break rocks down with a machine that is already operated by carabao, the local water buffalo, I would certainly give that a try before buying anything. But there seems to be no tradition of stone building or doing much with stone, so I'm not expecting to find that sort of machine.

Dale Hodgins wrote:I've seen several videos with various size units, but they never talk about production levels.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5evRPYNUjsk

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7eKXIoDaLWo

I may have to contact some of the manufacturers. I also may find that plenty of them exist in the southern Philippines and buy something on the used market. I know they are processing  lots of rock, because I see truckload of it, mostly broken down to  suitable size for making hollow blocks.

I hope to use my machine to break down used concrete as well. It seems that most people have no means of dealing with this stuff, so if I had a machine like this on the back of a tractor, it's likely that my future brother-in-law could make some money processing material for others. The majority of people don't have a vehicle suitable to haul heavy materials like stone in concrete.

The first link was of a crusher cheating: they were breaking slate!

But keep in mind crushing (as Natasha will probably assert as well) has more to do with jaw opening then anything. A 2 x 2 foot jaw crusher set at 1 inch is going to be slow, where as a 12 x 12 inch jaw crusher set at a 4 inch opening is going to be 10 times faster.

The other part of crushing, is how good the grizzly is. If you are putting small fines through it that do not need to be crushed, not only are you prematurely wearing out your jaws, but you are really slowing down production. Lets say you are crushing down to 2 inch, anything under that, you want screened out before it goes in the crusher.

That last point about production is, the most efficient way to break rock, is to have rock on top of it. By that I mean, you do not want that rock flying out. Ideally you control the feed so that the jaw is always covered so the rock can not bounce upward, but no so much rock that it is bogging down the jaw. It is a delicate balancing act!

It's pretty simple to break down large pieces of limestone if you know how to operate a sledgehammer. One person in 10,000 can do it as well as me so I will teach those who are teachable. I don't expect to work with more than a Four Man Crew doing stuff like this. Most of the properties I've looked at have areas of soil that's going to muck up during rain and areas of rock and scree. So, I would get them to excavate to 4 in deep and then build the path in the depression. Many motor bike paths are only one foot wide. I think I will go two feet wide with the occasional wider spot so a bike can be parked. Most roads don't need to accommodate anything wider than a motorcycle or wheelbarrow.

In low spots I want to go a few inches higher than the surrounding Terrain and put a good crown on the path.

The number one problem I've seen on land for sale and on land that has been occupied for a long time, is that there is very poor access whenever it rains and the ground softens up. Only a small minority use Rock to build a roadway. Most simply travel over the grass and switch spots if it muds up.

This might be a really silly question, but how much limestone can be safely broken with hand tools in an hour in the Philippines?  Do you have to break it down to fit in the crusher anyway? How's it compare to the cost of gas and equipment wear?  I'm sure it doesn't come close but I figured I should ask.

Some pieces of limestone are already suitably shaped to be used as building blocks, and others need to be whacked in the right spot. So I will make sure that they don't break down every usable block.

There will also be many pieces that are small enough to be put at the bottom of the path, and won't need to be run through the machine.

After a path is made with three quarter minus, some finely crushed stuff could be spread on top, for a nice finish. This tends to lock the larger pieces together. I've driven on roads that are made of 2 in material and The rocks roll around like marbles, when driven on. The fine material which is usually sold as road base here, can really make a big difference even if it's only 25% of the total. To make fine material, I'm pretty sure they break the rock to something uniform and then run it again.

Travis makes some good points about preventing the rocks from flying out. Because this is a fairly small unit, I expect that feeding it would be an easy job for one man and everyone else would be employed at loading wheelbarrows and bringing them to the crusher. I won't have less than 3 wheelbarrows. Most farms in the Philippines have none. That way they could just keep bringing the stuff and only one man would really have to become good at using the machine. I'm sure that will be me for a start and then I will try to find the best and brightest. Sobriety is often an issue. So I will police that strictly. The operator could crack rocks with a sledgehammer, if he finds himself waiting for the machine.

It's been my experience that whenever you have a unique apparatus, some workers will stand around and watch the thing, unless you enforce a no lookie-loo policy. Most people would rather run the machine, than do whatever it is they've been told to do. Doesn't seem to matter what type of machine it is.

OK so the bare bones to remember with a jaw crusher:
It's only crushing for 50% of the cycle time so it isn't very energy efficient
CCS means closed side setting (the nearest the Jaws get together)
If you set the Jaws too close together for the size of rock going in (ie you're asking the crusher to do too big a size reduction in one step) you will see the rock jump up and/or out of the crusher, the cycle will take longer and be even less efficient.
It is more energy efficient to screen using your grizzly or multiple of various sizes, run a batch of rock and get the CCS optimised, run all your rock of that size and put the product in a stock pile.
Then re process that stockpile with the CCS closer together.
Repeat and screen as required.

That Arrastra Crusher looks great.
I bet it could be useful for processing things other than rock.
Simple enough  to set up, maybe move it every 100 yards of progress,set it up again?

It occurs to me that a basic tumbler/trammel could work.
Too slow, perhaps.

Natasha obviously knows her stuff. It will all be hand-fed, so pretty easy to Crush according to size. There's going to be lots of hand labor involved with Gathering of  material, so they could put duck eggs in one bucket and goose eggs in another.

I don't anticipate getting them to pick up rocks smaller than an egg. That stuff can become part of the soil. Imagine that you are clearing a field of rocks to make farming more efficient and less likely to damage implements. Then I guess we'd run the larger Rock and save all of the small stuff to go through on the second run.

I'd want to have some means of stopping it quickly. When watching a video, I saw several poorly shaped rocks break into nice straight-sided pieces that could be useful for building. So it would be nice if we could stop to salvage that material before it is reduced further.


I'd be happy if we could produce a couple tons of finished material per man per day. I expect production speed will have more to do with the efficiency of gathering the material, since we might run out of surface rock and need to to pry some of it from the hillside.

Anything too big to be broken up with a sledgehammer, will just be left there.

i was in the process of buying a 6x10 jaw crusher from a chinese company when things got fishy
they wanted me to buy two units all the sudden saying it wasnt worth sending only 1 unit... that they only make a small amount per unit and other BS making me suspicious and i did not end up getting it
unfortunate since the ones here from mount baker mining was 10 times as much money and out of my budget

wanted it to improve the road to my property

After making a few calls to various contractors in the area of the Philippines where I'm looking, it appears that many would be willing to drop off rocks from time to time, when they are cleaning up their sights. Obviously you'd want to really keep a close eye on what they are bringing. So there might be a way to keep my future brother-in-law in aggregate, without having to mine my own land or purchase the stuff. I expect to buy one of those small 3 ton trucks that are very common in Asia, for block delivery.

Either buy one or contract someone who has one. We could also sell site cleanup. Get them to pile all of their rocks in a few locations and never go home empty.

I'm looking at some sites that have some bare rock, due to erosion , so I might also sell clean up of organic waste at construction sites. I would cover the ground liberally with whatever nature provides and then give it all a sprinkling of finely crushed material. Should make some type of soil.

Dale did you ever get your rock crusher? I have 2 small Yanmar tractors and was thinking of doing the same. There is a guy in Pamganga that imports jaw crushers from China. I would be very interested if you did manage to set yours up? Cheers!!!

I took a video of a belt-driven rock crusher at the Great Oregon Steamup last August. It was powered by a steam tractor. I didn't get close enough to find out who made it. I guess I could have asked the operator.

Steam powered rock crusher video