Ideas That Didn't Work: Crushing the Soil Prior to Screening

We were hoping that if we dried the soil and used a plancheta (hand held crusher) that the result would be a finer soil that would go through the screen easier and allow us to use a greater percentage of the total extracted. The reality was that it took a long time to dry the soil completely and once you had that it was rock hard and still didn't break down too well even with the plancheta. If the soil was even slightly moist if would compact and create even more of a problem. We concluded that the time to spread the soil and wait for it to dry and then crush it was less efficient than taking it directly from the extraction pile to the screen.