Building a cardboard shredder
Published by Jordan Skole on 1/7/2022
Inspiration
The setup for this project came to me from a few tiktok accounts that showed up on my "for you" page. It was basically just some videos of hands throwing different things into a metal scrap shredder.
If you have never seen anything like this before, it's work a watch, these machines are super cool. These things even anhililate the head of a sledgehammer.
Take a look at a few of these videos:
It turns out there isn't very much that is a match for a super torquey set of gears.
The problem
One of the things that I constantly struggle with is pizza boxes. They don't fit in the garbage, but they also suck to recycle. I am not sure why they drive me nuts, but there is something about them that really irks me.
This christmas I spent a couple hours at least just breaking down cardboard boxes in order to make my front door usable again.
The Solution
Initially I thought I would just use the gear generator app inside of Easel to just come up with a few gears that mesh together out of some 3/4 inch plywood I have lying around the garage.
brainstorm v1
But as I started doing a bit "more research" (watched YouTube videos) into production metal shredders I realized that I actually wanted to take a different approach to the gears. It looks like the shredder isn't actually made up of "gears" that mesh together at all.
It is made of alternating sets of "teeth" that create what looks like much more of a sheering force than what I imagine would be a "poking" force as created by the gears.
Notice how the "gears" aren't actually gears, they don't mesh at all.
The other thing that was cool about my additional research was a few of the other videos and creators I came across. For example I found Jeremy Fielding and instantly became a fan.
Jeremy actually went down the plastic shredding rabbit hole, which I didn't even know was a thing!!
He built his design off of a series of videos from a guy named dave: