Hi Folks,
After being inspired by the precious plastic machines and community, I want to use the concepts to produce a variety of things, but I want to make somewhat of a business out of it that will both clean up a significant amount of garbage, give employment and improve homes in the developing country that I live in.

Each machine will need to be scaled up and I’ll start by trying to produce plastic sheets via compression. I’ve got the melting, forms and press mostly figured out, but I’m going to need a lot of shredded plastic. I can buy some locally, but it is about 6x more expensive than raw, sorted plastic from recycling centers.

So, I’ve been thinking about how to increase the output of the shredder – the problem is that large motors are extraordinarily expensive.

The only realistic solution that I can think of is to repurpose a junker car/truck and essentially convert the driveshaft into a shredder – replace it with square tubing which would allow for blades and spacers made with a grinder from thick sheet metal to be slid on and off easily when they need to be sharpened/replaced.

Putting aside any environmental concerns, does this seem feasible? I don’t know enough about transmissions/gearboxes to know how to step down the engine RPM to something more usable, especially if I need to increase the engine RPM to get it up into its peak torque range. Any thoughts?

Thanks!