Thanks for the always splendid TRs!
The ring gear as well as the races on either side of it ("bands" riding on rollers) caught my eye, as well. Looks like a motor or a belt-driven gear would have been turning the "pipe". The rig looks like a rod mill although the chute and what appears to be a heating apparatus on the uphill side mystifies me. A rod mill is a steel or iron cylinder containing many long hardened steel rods. Chunks of raw ore and some water are fed by gravity into the upper end of the cylinder and a power supply and gearing rotate the ore and the rods. As they rotate, the rods come crashing down upon the ore, crushing it to finer and finer size. I understand that rod mills, ball mills, and for certain stamp mills made quite the racket at the old mine/mill sites.
My mining experience was always in finding the darn stuff (orebodies) rather than knowing how to process ore, so milling, concentrating, and smelting or retorting in the case of mercury has always been a "black box" thing for me.
Great looking pics and the old article from just a year after I was born was terrific!
Foy