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• This is pretty cool, but it should really be titled "How to attach a handle to an old electric shredder and attach it to a desk." I mean, I was sort of hoping to find out how to actually make a shredder, because I'm in the market for one and didn't really want to invest 25 bucks in an electric one. This article requires an electric shredder to begin with!

  Posted by: serriere on September 11, 2006 at 9:34 PM

• This is pretty cool, but it should really be titled "How to attach a handle to an old electric shredder and attach it to a desk." I mean, I was sort of hoping to find out how to actually make a shredder, because I'm in the market for one and didn't really want to invest 25 bucks in an electric one. This article requires an electric shredder to begin with!

  Posted by: serriere on September 11, 2006 at 9:35 PM

• I've been thinking about making an uber shredder, all hand (or foot) powered, because my old paper shredder pops my breaker on a regular basis, and I don't want to invest the gas in a chipper shredder, so I'm thinking, ok, combine the two monsters into one homemade monster.

  Needs to be sturdy, so I'm thinking a 2 foot length of half inch steel piping, say 8" to 1' diameter, also needs to be able to chip wood and shred paper, hmm, little tougher, a normal chipper uses a spinning flywheel with a blade on it to chip, an investment in kinetic energy and weight I'd rather avoid, so I'm thinking ripsaw blades, set in such a way as to overlap slightly and rotate counter to each other, maybe three or four, would allow me to use high torque, low rotation, or high rotation low torque, depending on what's going in.
  Now the shredder part is a little tougher, normal shredders use overlapping blades in a rolling scissor type fashion, but I need something that could deal with small branches or chunks of wood, along with paper, so I'm thinking a larger, courser version of the typical shredder design, just to cut the bulkier pieces down, and feed it into basically a pasta cutter type design, with the blade on the inside, so only things small enough to pass through the grill would go through, otherwise they stay in the hopper getting continually chopped by a pair or set of counter rotating blades.

  Should leave me with confetti, regardless of whether I put in a phonebook, a napkin or a tree limb.

  Not sure how I'll handle the gearing, wonder if I could find like a used Yugo manual transmission, those can't be that big right?

  Posted by: DGary on September 12, 2006 at 10:16 AM

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