406's New Toy... I Mean Tool

Hey everyone,

Hope your scrapping is going well. For the past 6 months I've been working on building my own shredder. If you look online for one it's going to take a minimum of $8-$10K. I decided it would be easier for me to design and build my own one. After a few months of designing and revising I was ready to get the parts cut and put together. It took more than expected because I had more of an expense on milling the axels. So far this project was planned to be at $3k at the most. I am now $500 over that, but it's almost done. Last night I assembled the unit for the first time and I gotta say, It's looking good. I thought I'd share a few pictures of the parts. I'm doing one hard push today and tomorrow to finish shredder. Once it's running I will definitely post a video because after all, who doesn't like a good video of stuff being shredded up?

Originally Posted by matador

I was going to ask about that- it looks a lot closer to being ready to shred than the parts were when I last saw you. So, does this mean that you want me to dump.... errr "bring" those printers to you now?

This one is almost done. Hopefully I'll have it ready by the end of the week. As soon as I run some materials through it to see how well it works I'll have a good answer on the printers. Once all of the "undocumented features" of the current one are worked out I'll be starting on the big one for processing larger stuff.

Well. There have been a few undocumented features to the unit like that it tears itself apart. I mean who doesn’t love a piece of equipment that tears itself apart? I’ve reinforced the unit for a third time. On the last round the gear box actually locked up. It didn’t damage the unit, but for a gearbox that has 420 foot pounds of torque that’s a concerning thing. Especially since it was a fairly thin piece of steel that caused it. I have the unit set up again so I’ll be doing some load testing tonight. If it does not go according to plan I’ll be ordering another $500 in blade spacers and $150 in gears. Gotta love the load testing side of things

A lot of these types of machines will have a mechanism that will reverse the spin. I assume there is some sort of sensor that detects when there is a jam.

Originally Posted by blackgold12

To bad it doesn't work and I guess we now know why one would set us back $8-$10K

I was really really hoping it would go together perfectly on the first round, but I'm only $3,500 in so I've got some wiggle room before I hit the $8k mark

Originally Posted by mthomasdev

A lot of these types of machines will have a mechanism that will reverse the spin. I assume there is some sort of sensor that detects when there is a jam.

I've seen the reverse spin controller that many shredders have and that is something that I plan to put on the bigger shredder (possibly this one too). My dad is helping get that part designed/built since he's an electronics design engineer with 35 years of experience. He looked at it and said it would be easy to do. I have never designed a circuit board in my life so it's really awesome that he's helping on this project!

"Not far". LoL, 2000kms is the length of NewZealand !

America must be HUGE !!



( I can drive across NZ in about less than 4 hours.)

It's been a busy few weeks/month on this little project. I ended up getting the unit running, but is struggled with processing thin steel. I did try a server hard drive and it just about killed the unit and snapped the chain.

After upgrading the gear ratio from 1:1 to a 1:2 and going 2 levels up on chain size I tried the shredder again. It was able to chomp up those little laptop hard drives just fine....until I tried an aluminum platter unit, then I just tripped the breaker.

I ordered another gearbox to connect to the blue one. It seems the major issue was torque related. With this new gearbox I was jumping up from 420 ft/lbs of torque per axel to 2100 ft/lbs of torque.

This worked really well! Unfortunately when I tried a big piece of material it tore the wooden frame apart. Why wood and not steel? I didn't want to have a steel one built until I was sure everything was good to go.

The next step and hopefully the final step is going to be to install the thinner blade spacers and get the steel frame finished. I think this project may be in the home stretch!

Originally Posted by 406Refining

It's been a busy few weeks/month on this little project. I ended up getting the unit running, but is struggled with processing thin steel. I did try a server hard drive and it just about killed the unit and snapped the chain.

After upgrading the gear ratio from 1:1 to a 1:2 and going 2 levels up on chain size I tried the shredder again. It was able to chomp up those little laptop hard drives just fine....until I tried an aluminum platter unit, then I just tripped the breaker.

I ordered another gearbox to connect to the blue one. It seems the major issue was torque related. With this new gearbox I was jumping up from 420 ft/lbs of torque per axel to 2100 ft/lbs of torque.

This worked really well! Unfortunately when I tried a big piece of material it tore the wooden frame apart. Why wood and not steel? I didn't want to have a steel one built until I was sure everything was good to go.

The next step and hopefully the final step is going to be to install the thinner blade spacers and get the steel frame finished. I think this project may be in the home stretch!

At this point, you HAVE to get it working! No matter the cost.... Even if it costs more than a commercial already built unit, it's the principal of it lol.... Plus you'll know everything about it and know how to fix it and keep it running forever once you get it working 100%