Metal Casting Zone

Has anyone here used a cement mixer as a greensand muller? How did it work/not work?
Any other methods that were sucessfull? If heard a wheelbarrow and a hoe works but is slow and labor intensive.

Ive been thinking of this also, I have a mixer and dont see any reason it wouldnt work.
Add sand then kitty litter and let run untill the kitty litter is reduced to dust then add water. Kinda like a giant rock tumbler....

I would be willing to bet that it does good with dry sand, but not so when you add the water since the sand never gets as wet as concrete. I bet it just starts to stick together and clump up. I would love to know the results.

Just a thought what if you either cut slots in the mixing blades or cast a set that you attach to the blades then it would aerate as well as mix. It would at a min break up the lumps.

~Eureka

Something to try if you just have a small batch, get two heavy duty garbage bags or a large tarp. Put one bag inside the other and fill the inside bag with 40 or 50 lbs of sand. Walk around on the bags, compressing and squeezing the sand together. Roll the sand around in the bags and repeat until you get sick of doing it. Riddle the sand into your storage bin and there ya go. You can use a large tarp the same way, just double it up and put the sand in between. It works pretty well, it's what I do, cheap and simple. It's just a variation on the way it used to be done. I do have a muller in progress, I may even finish it one of these years.
I have heard of people using mixers, get something solid that can fall around inside to help squash the sand together, you are trying to evenly distribute the clay on the surface of the sand grains, and a smearing/squishing action is more effective.

I do the bag trick now, its alot of work even in small batches.

I went to the garden center and picked up a bulb planting auger. It attaches to my drill. Then I drill down into my 5 gal bucket of sand and clay until it's mixed well, then I dump it into another bucket to get the stuff that hides in the bottom.
Once it's mixed I just add a little water and mix it until I get it the way I want. It's usually dry before I get to use it again, I just add some more water and fluff it with the drill some more..