Hi everyone! I’m on a farm and would love to know if anyone else has tried using the shredder for any other applications? I’m thinking as a hammer mill for grain and animal feed processing or a stand-in for an apple cider mill.
It seems reasonable that one could draw some alternative tooth designs and set up the shredder to serve other purposes… useful when you only need to grind apples for a few weeks out of the year. Not only would this make specialized mills more affordable for small farms, but it would put plastics processing in the hands of more people too.
Hi @lwfbiochar,
Not sure if somebody did something like this before. But I do like the idea a lot! Because plastic is pretty though, other purposes should not be big deal (unless breaking glass or so).
Be aware that ‘just swapping’ different blades can take a lot of time since the blades are hard to reach.
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Hi everybody, I was wondering if it was possible to hack or to fit the shreddershredder application into shredding and grinding other type of materials like leather ? I al actively looking for solutions in this matter.
Best
Coming back to this – i should say that our little shredder has worked very well for almost all #4 LDPE we’ve fed it. Agricultural drip tape is almost self feeding. which is nice. I made a few mistakes early on: I doubled the amount of cutting area, rely to heavy on the shear pin, and spin it at 60 RPM. In hindsight I’d go much slower and drive it with a belt or something…
For fun: attached is a photo of the tumbler attachment our crew fabbed up shortly after I originally posted last year.
we ultimately set ours up as a multi-machine – i think i’ve read others doing it here too… spider coupling (with high torque urethane insert) joins the gear box to the shredder shaft – which we made extra long too. We can remove the shredder from the frame and drop in a tumbler unit (made from a 15 gal lp tank) for making greensand. Or pop a roller mill in place.
I may have messed up by drilling a thru-hole through the shredder shaft and dropping in a shear pin. Would still love to know what others are doing for over-torque safety.
With my 3HP I shredded lots of leaves last fall, used it for some animal feed prep, shredded some woody herbs for soapmaking, etc. But I really had to baby it. Kept popping shear pins. Of course apples fall through it like water… but I didn’t use stainless steel… so there ya go.
I’ve been approached by a few locals for shredding jobs – a papermaker wants kudzu vines shredded… a guncase maker wants excess foam shredded for ‘bean’ bag chairs… sadly neither of these worked well in the 60 RPM unit.
On another note – We got a hold of a Weima Wl-4 !!! (1992 model) It’s been outside for years in rain and snow… needless to say the electronics are toast. Modified it last week to run off our tractor PTO and hydraulics… can’t wait to show it off in a few days! I gotta say I’m with @anne-barbier on this one though – I’d def recommend anyone serious about shredding for more than a hobby go out and track down a salvage industrial unit.
why: I think Dave Hakken wanted to sold it as ready-to-use package, at low cost, for everybody….that can happen when designers design out of the window frame and treat such thing as pet and/or design project…
I think your advice is pretty much the same what i keep repeating here mostly to newbies: do the thing right from the beginning, skip the PP machines (and all the pain) and let’s go from there. I repeatedly found myself bouncing my head against ‘wtf i am doing here’
so yes, taking a well known shredder brand, customize it, and then do PP for real
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Yes, this is why I am thinking it is better to look at this in reverse. Rather than recreating the wheel – something people are having tremendous difficulty doing, even at great expense – why not use well-tested, more powerful machines that are readily available (since they can turn things bigger than branches into powder)?
@lwfbiochar I think perhaps we should look at this problem in reverse – use already existing, plentiful grain mills to process plastic. I’m going to check out a bunch of them tomorrow and hopefully find something that will work.
