DavidF wrote:Ok I gotta have one of those shreaders!! Where do they come from, or do I have to make it? Just the shreader part, not tthe gear reducer and motors, I have them all ready...
Edit: found them, pricey!
My motor in the pictures is rated at 2 hp, 3450 RPM 100% duty cycle. It is off of a campbell hausfeld air compress I was not using.
The speed reducer is a 30 to 1 ratio although I have tried a 40 to 1 ratio and it also worked well. The pulleys allow for enough speed adjustment and work well in the range needed. For small pre-chipped bits a 1 to 1 pulley ratio is very quick and works well. I will have to measure the pulley sizes pictured. They are setup in the pictures for power and torque and doing the initial breakdown of the bandsaw cut pieces. With this setup, there really is not much that will be able to bind the shredder up and bog it. If you put something in, it's going to come out shredded pretty much.
I strongly recommend doing the speed reducer setup pictured. I tried doing a chain and sprocket drive with a quadruple reducer also through chain and sproket. This worked well but allowed the shredder to kick back and buck which did break a shaft on me. The side loading of the sproket and chain for drive also put terrible strain on the whole mechanial setup.
The speed reducer only does twisting of course and does not sideload any shafts. Also much quieter and smoother.
The Filamaker is a pricey unit, but it is very well made, I also believe that they are being shipped in a stainless steel version by default now for all it's main components. It's a tough and reliable unit, I have run mine for literally 30 hours in the configuration pictured with zero failures and no real sign of wear. It seems expensive, but you will be very hard pressed to make a similar unit that is this robust from scratch. The time it would take makes this a very good choice. You can also by a screen that fits to the bottom of it that prevents any bit larger than the screen size from going through. They are recycled and re-shredded until they fit through the screen. Very handy, I current re-feed my whole batch through a few times, works, but the screen would be much nicer.
