Sorry for the late reply Rob, first of all, when you pass stone through a jaw crusher you get a product with a partical size with a range of a few microns to some stone actually larger than the gap size the jaws are set at (it all depends on the shape of the stone being processed), then the stuff can be screened//or washed and all of the fraction that is of a size that can be processed will go over the jigs (size is deternmined by carefull metallurgy to find the optimum size to release/free max gold with min crushing,,,, reason for that is that we're going for gravity recovery system,,ok,, if we grind the ore (and gold) particals too small, gravity will start having less of an effect on the gold compared with the other forces acting on it,,ie surface tension and others etc therefore recovery drops off.(the gold goes out in the tails.)
The over size can then maybe go through a gyro or straight in the ballmill (again throught put must be worked out so that over grinding does not occur)... (also save $$ on grinding)
As for stamp batteries (or stampers) They are inefficent and labour intensive and have a low through put. The standard 5 head battery (as used by the Vic Mines Dept in the State Batteries ,,actually they had 2 x banks of 5) had a through put of about 8 tons of stone per day (the Bright Battery could I think only manage 5 tons per 5 heads per day as the stone was hard from the Peabody Mine area).
Some of the batteries in Bendigo had upto and I think more than 100 heads!!!! wear was about 1lb (.5kg)of metal per ton of stone crushed and the ore was passed trough a jaw crusher before it entered the battery box.
Hope this helps
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