Paper shredders for the office

If a smaller "resivoir" machine will handle your volume, buy it, cut the bottom out of it's basket and mount it over the old basket with sheet metal or plywood, etc. We made ours fit the recycling bin...

BE SURE TO GET THE CONFETTI TYPE. There are readers and computer programs out there now that can read and reassemble strips from strip shredded documents.

Steve

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I have a staples branded unit, 16 sheet, "titanium cutter" - this is much better than the fellows it replaced and cuts much smaller so it's more secure - and it cuts faster - could be worth a look

Hit all the Salvation Army, St. Vincent D' Paul and all the local thrift stores.

In California anyways..shredders are regularly found. And one can simply put a shredder on a piece of plywood and put it on a 55 gallon drum if necessary

Gunner

One could not be a successful Leftwinger without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of Leftwingers, a goodly number of Leftwingers are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid. Gunner Asch

I have this one:

Well ... we had several "Intimus 007" shredders at work back about fifteen years ago (one per building). Probably around 40" high or so, with an interlock on the Plexiglass safety cover. Cut about 1/32" wide by about 3/16" long (most likely actually metric dimensions, as I seem to remember it being made in Germany. Three phase power, a big wire basket in the bottom with a very big plastic bag lining it.

It shredded a lot of material rather quickly -- at least until someone put a binder clip on the shelf and it vibrated into the shred area and it stopped with a bang which was heard all around the building. When I got there, I found one very embarrassed secretary. :-)

I opened it up, and discovered that not only did it break the double roller chain which went from motor to cutter bars, but also broke the base on which the parts were mounted. (And of course several cutter discs were beyond help.)

However -- they were quite expensive. It took quite a while to get a replacement budgeted, so lots of trips to other buildings to shred documents.

A later model of this appears here:

It appears to have the shredding head separate from the enclosure, runs from 120 VAC single phase (with a 240 VAC version available), and sells for $6375.00 at this places's sale price.

Apparently some of the console types are available on eBay, some currently showing for well under $1000.00.

Good Luck, DoN.

I use an old GBC shredder. It has a nylon drive gear on a 7/16" hex shaft that used to slip badly until I replaced the hub with a piece of a cheap bicycle type wrench. It only handles about three sheets at a time but a few years back, I set it up over a garbage bag stand and produced 17 leaf bags of shredded paper. Like you, I shred everything, even flyers, and set out a leaf bag every couple months. If someone wants to re-assemble anything out of my recyclable paper I wish them lots of luck - I know it can be done, but the return would be negligible. Gerry :-)} London, Canada

BOYCOTT STAPLES!! Staples is to stationery what HD is to home repair.

Too bad berlers cain't accommodate garbage. Heh, but *fireplaces* can!

Chop out/off the bottom of the bin, and set it on a bigger bin/trash can/chute. If the design of the one you buy for its shredding abilities (pay attention to duty cycles - some are laughable) requires chopping the bottom of the machine as well as the bin, so be it.

Then if you really want to make it impossible to recover data, add some manure, food scraps, etc. and put it on the garden.

I'm happy with the one I presently use, but it's not up to the sort of use you're putting yours to, and no longer available anyway.

That's the best idea yet. It never occurred to me to compost sensitive papers. Now if I could just be sure the raccoons haven't learned about identity theft.

"Existential Angst" on Fri, 16 Jul 2010

Staples business model is to be the "late night convince store" of office supplies. When you positively absolutely need one, they'll have something which will do the job - for a price. It is their niche, and it works for them.

Gerald Miller on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:00:37 -0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

I use shredded documents for fire starter. Works well enough.

Ned Simmons on Fri, 16 Jul 2010 13:33:12 -0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

With those masks ... what are they trying to conceal?

Living alone, and being of sound mind (was that you, honey?) and over

I would never suggest that anyone else defeat safety mechanisms. You could perhaps take the short-basket model you mention. Saw the bottom off the basket, and strap the whole thing (shredder, and basket with open bottom) over a larger trash bin. That way, the small, open-bottom basket would act as a shield, and keep peoples fingers away from the gnashing of teeth and weeping and wailing and such.

Wish I'd read this before typing my reply.

(...)

Are we not metalworkers?

I'm envisioning an 'open source' shredder. 'Way overbuilt. Interdigitated banks of hardened tool steel punches of various sizes convert up to 10 sheets per pass into small pieces of random shapes.

Here is a use for that 1 HP gear motor you've been saving!

--Winston

I got a Fellowes DM12Ct at Costco for about $99 and I'm quite happy with it. It has plenty of power to munch the thick credit card offer envelopes full of crap without opening them. Also does CD/DVD/BD, etc. The machine is about 24" tall or so and notable heavy at the shredder mechanism. The lower portion and basket is around the size of a standard office trash can (10 gal size?).

...

OP referred to 'cross-cut' shredding, so already was looking, I think, for what you refer to as 'confetti type'.

...

By 'interdigitated', do you mean that punches would be operating from both sides of the paper? I suppose that would avoid the need to make dies as well as punches.

Another approach would be to adapt an inexpensive wood planer* either by substituting a long stack of slitting saws on an axle in place of the cutterhead (ie, part #53 of HF 95082, or part #22 of HF 39860) or substituting serrated blades in place of the straight planer blades. How keep it from jamming, or from letting pages go thru uncut, are details left to the reader.

• Like or

Where only the top inch of lots of pages needed shredding, I've used a wood-cutting bandsaw for trimming that part off of two-inch thick stacks of pages, to cut down on volume through the shredder itself. When you start with a ton of paper, the "shred everything" advice given in some other posts doesn't make sense.

(...)

I was thinking 'interleaved', like:

The resulting donor sheets could be shredded by a conventional crosscut. Two separate bins would allow you to dispose of the holes this week and the remainder of the sheet next week. :)

I can't envision how punching from both sides would work, unless one had solid punches that mated with hollow punches....

Perhaps an outdoor approach using parallel plasma beams? That way you could extract the resulting gas and use it to power the shredder!

--Winston