Topic Tag: shredder

I'm starting a new thread to discuss our options for laser or water jet cutting a gear reducer box or head along with the shredder parts. The gear reducer was the hardest thing for me to source, and it seems others have had the same trouble. I've been lucky, and found 3/4hp Baldor motor with a 50:1 worm drive reducer on craigslist for my first shredder, and I just found a 40:1 industrial worm drive for $5 at a local shop, but the problem is that finding reducers for the shredder is not reliable, and new reducers are expensive. This seems like a critical problem for the replicability of the design. In the states, I can buy a 1700 RPM, 2HP motor from Harbor Freight for about $160 USD, but the reducer is much harder to source. I've seen people mention worm drives and planetary gears. It seems feasible to me, though outside of my design ability, to make a reducer that can be CNC cut out of 6mm metal, along with the other shredder parts, and assembled into a gear box that can accept a standard 1700-3600RPM motor, and reduce it to somewhere in the range of 60-100RPM. I found this Cycloid drive on the thingiverse that looks like it could be CNC cut. They even include the DXF files for it. So let this be a discussion of our options for easily sourcing a replicable, cheap, powerful speed reducer, in order to make the shredder easier to replicate.