120mm Steel Ball Production Process… Skew Rolling Mill Machine

If you ever played the game Mouse Trap as a kid, you’re going to LOVE this video. I know that was one of my favorite games, although we never actually played the board game part of it, we just set up the trap to see if we could make it work. We would run through the steps, figure out what we had left out of the mechanism, and usually on about the 3rd or 4th try, we’d bring down the trap and catch the mouse. Of course, we were immediacy board and threw everything back in the box and went off the play with something else.

This factory looks very much like a full-size version of that game, although it is much less colorful and a lot louder. The factory is churning out some massive 120mm steel balls. We aren’t sure exactly what one would need nearly 5 inch diameter steel balls for, but we now know what they look like when they’re being, and it’s pretty mesmerizing to watch.

They start by rolling down a metal chute to a short conveyor, which dumps the balls into hoppers, sorted by hand by workers. From there, long worm gears line the balls up and move them slowly down the line to another chute. We assume this is all carefully timed as part of the cooling process, as the next step after the chute is a dunk into a water tank, which should speed up the cooling process rather drastically.

We know tempering makes metal stronger and more durable, so dropping them into the tank is probably the last step before they’re sent off to be finished with some polishing or perhaps chemically coated.

If you need something to satisfy that insatiable need to watch all of those gadgets work in sequence to trap that mouse under that little plastic cage, this just may scratch that itch.