Build a Cheap High Volume Styrofoam Shredder

so how do you go from this that gets thrown into our landfills and sits there for 50 years to this that you can build all kinds of wonderful projects stay tuned and i'll show you how to build a cheap high volume fast shredder [Music] hi all stephen williams here with creative building and yes you can build some wonderful creative buildings out of styrofoam shredded styrofoam you mix it with air crete and you can build super insulated houses garages workshops well houses dog houses fences you can insulate your floor you can do blowing insulation in your house just incredible but you got to shred the styrofoam and so i looked on google look to see what's available commercial shredders run six thousand dollars and more so i went to youtube to see how did they crack this problem and i was surprised at how few videos there were and the majority of them were all surrounded around a design that uses a shaft or a barrel with screws or nails sticking out either way with the heads or the the tips and it spins and you build a box to direct the shredded styrofoam in and i build three proto prototypes with this and here's my latest one i'll show you how well it works [Laughter] okay you get the idea it works but it is super slow this will take forever [Music] so i start racking my brain to figure out how can i speed this process up what is out there i can convert really easily so i thought about a a chipper a wood chipper so i rented one for an hour but it did more crushing than it did shredding had a very small inlet which was a problem and would be really hard to modify uh how it comes out so i didn't think that was a good solution then i thought i wonder if i could make a giant blender out of an electric lawnmower so i found one on craigslist for forty dollars uh flipped it upside down took off the wheels and everything else i didn't need and unhook the handle got a plastic barrel and 55 gallon plastic barrel cut the bottom out of it and gorilla taped it all the way around to the mower and then i then i took an eight inch galvanized duck and panel beaded it into my fitting that would fit around the exit on the lawn mower and then i used a six inch dryer vent and hooked it on up to this cap this lid that i made out of plywood and then i put the screen so to let all the air out and i'll flip it over so i cut this ring so that it would fit perfectly on the barrel and then i made an octagon for eight sides and then used little pieces of uh plywood along the edges here to support it where i put it together and just screwed it together it was simple and uh seals the top off and that works really well then i fired this thing up and wow i mean i threw a couple pieces in here mulched it up and it threw it out here nothing flat and i thought wow i'm onto something here this is gonna work but the biggest issue was it was throwing off big chunks so i needed to keep it within the hopper and so i got this chicken mesh which is a one inch square and put it right at the exit as it exits out of the deck of the mower and gorilla taped it in place cut a slot actually to drop it down in there so it'd be really secure and that did it now the first one i did i tried to gorilla tape it in without cutting a groove and over time it would bend or it was so close to the blade that it would catch the blade and tear it up and uh when it would bend it back over time then it had a cavity where it would get clogged up with pieces and then the whole dryer duct would fill up with um styrofoam and i had to shut it off and clean it all out well once i got it up close and secure and got this thing where it wasn't bending i'd never got a a lockdown like that again another clog so that worked out really well with the design now the first model that i bought was a black and decker 19 inch it's this one over here and i cut a groove all the way around with a four inch grinder with a cutting wheel and also use my multi-purpose saw and cut through the plastic this whole thing is plastic even this part and then i set it down over there then i put little screws to screw it all the way around and then gorilla taped it and sealed it up good now the 19 inch mower is a little bit small so it fit around here and then was wide over on top of this i had to cut a little notch to get it over the exit chute and you can see the wire here and how bent it is on this old one and the new one how much better that is so simple and this has your mower the blood the motor the blade all that all ready to go you just have to house it and get going with it and duct it out into whatever you want to use it on so i uh have it on a barrel and i've got these contractor bags that i'm using they're these drum liners and they're one mil they're super thin they're useless for anything else except shredded styrofoam it works wonderful for this but i don't know how you can use it for anything else in construction and then i i drilled holes around the barrel when you don't have the holes you get a seal and you put the bag in there you start filling it up and the air is keeping it from expanding and filling the bag and you have to come in here and release the pressure and let it drop down and get it going again if you drill holes no problem air can get out and it fills the barrel up and then it helps you too when you're trying to get this thing out of the barrel you get a suction and you got to get your hand down the side and let the air in to let it pop it out such a simple design and it works great to appreciate how much of this stuff you need my 30 by 40 workshop has nine foot high walls five and a half inches thick and it took roughly 80 55 gallon bags of styrofoam for just for the walls then i came in and insulated the ceiling 1200 square feet about 9 inches thick that took another 100 bags of styrofoam now when i'm going around to the furniture stores and that is where you're going to find it appliance toys furniture stores i mean half of their trash is styrofoam it's amazing how much they go through with this stuff and they're glad to get rid of it because ultimately they're paying by the volume for their truck to take it to the landfill and if you can uh get friends with these these folks and go on a regular circuit to go pick it up they'll separate it and put it aside for you if they can count on you to come and pick it up so how could i improve the design on this thing i don't need an opening this size to at the top now having a barrel this high is important because i can't reach the blades so i can be pushing stuff down in here and not have a problem at first i was just shoving big chunks in here and it would get jammed and i'd be pushing it down and i found if i would break it up in about 12 inch max pieces and a really thick styrofoam like blocks of this size you want to chop it up and i use a little hatchet over there to chop it into pieces this is too big to throw in i would break that up in about three pieces throw that into the hopper and it works great and then it would be spinning that would never get caught up and you listen to the motor when it starts to bear down you would slow down on that i found two after about 150 bags my blackened decker uh quit on me oh man i must be wearing out these motors so i end up buying another one and the second one was this cobalt blue one here and it's a 21 inch and it fits perfectly for the barrel i mean it was made for it was beautiful and again i cut a groove all the way around this was metal on the decking versus plastic on the other one and uh again use screws i used self-tapping screws to screw into the metal and then gorilla taped it inside and out to seal it and and it went for five hours and then quit on me here now oh this is bad i'm really wearing these motors out so i got on youtube to look at how do you work and repair your electric lawnmower i've never worked on electric lawnmower before youtube came to the rescue there's several videos over there really simple on electric lawn mowers the items that typically go bad is the switch in the handle or the brushes on the motor and you pop the lid off of the top of the motor it's got a 50 volt dc motor in there there's two brushes and they're carbon blocks and essentially they just start to wear out where we're out and finding you got to replace the the brushes get online look up your model number order use some cheap brushes they just pop in and away you go again and then the connections on those brushes come loose there is a diode rectifier because you got to convert alternating current to dc direct current so the rectifier essentially corrects it to this has a big capacitor which smooths it out to give it the 50 volt dc that you need and the capacitor sometimes goes out the diode rectifier sometimes goes out that'll blow your circuit that wasn't what was going on with mine so i knew that wasn't the problem when i got into mine one of the connections on the motor had come loose so i crimped it a little better so it would slide on there and hold and uh ended up i fired it back up again works great but what i was i found out when i opened it up there was a lot of shredded styrofoam inside this thing that is a problem i mean you're sealing up the motor you've got sparks going on fire hazard and so it needs to breathe so i took a t-shirt cut it and fit it over and taped it all the way around as a filter so that it can still get air but it'll keep the styrofoam out of it and the problem with this is it's open and you get all this trap all this uh styrofoam coming out and you end up with a mountain of styrofoam all around it and it seals up where this motor can't breathe so i'm a lot more conscious about that and keeping that clean so that this thing can breathe so i'm going to tear into this 19 inch blackened decker and i bet it's something trivial like the brushes have gone bad on the thing and it's fine but i've got it as an extra this one's working great so how do you improve this thing well you could cut this barrel in half or down to a third over here put a lid on it and then design a shoot a smaller shoot that will help to keep all the styrofoam inside it you could take three 55 i mean five gallon buckets cut the bottoms out and tape three of them together and there's your chute on the top and that's what i think i'm going to try and do you want to have some kind of just quick connects over here so you pop this lid off so you can get in here and sharpen your blades clean it out when it gets clogged and then pop it back on and clamp it down and you can get some that start round styrofoam with a cut when you have an edge like that and fit that all the way around you know where you cut it right here and your lid will seal real nicely on that the other thing is this thing's noisy and it's because this thing is like an amplifier on the mower and if you close it up that will most likely uh help to keep it quieter the other thing is this screen on the top when it starts filling up all of a sudden this whole screen turns white and you know i'm checking in here is this thing full and i can't see anything so then i have to kind of judge okay i think it's full and i'll cut it off and i'll pop the lid off and i've got a hill of styrofoam and i just got to scoop it off to the side because i can't get that much in the bag and i was tying the there's there's four ties on the top that you can tie that was taking too long so i got some of this um wire that you can twist i cut it into you know little six inch pieces and twist the thing and twist this and way faster i'm all about speed it takes about four minutes for me to get 55 gallons of shredded styrofoam so i'm averaging about five minutes of bag for me to go around to the furniture stores in my area in about two and a half hours i can come back with a full packed truckload and that'll do about 15 to 18 55 gallon bags of styrofoam so uh you know you factor the time in that's about 10 minutes a bag plus five minutes to shred it i'm averaging about 15 minutes a bag which is not bad a little bit of gas money hardly anything and the stuff is free uh and you know using your time off to to be able to do this and you can do wonderful projects now usually you know i'll do 30 bags of this stuff and i'll work with that and get it in the walls and then go around and shred some more and do it in stages uh i mean you could before you ever get started shred you know 150 bags of styrofoam and put it in in a shed or something ready to go it would be nice if we had a recycling place and here's a business model for somebody uh where we can collect all the the styrofoam in our town and have that have shred shredded styrofoam you just come and buy your 50 100 bags of styrofoam for your project and i'm hoping that the demand for styrofoam is going to get so high that people are going to start doing this in every town we have some towns that are recycling styrofoam and you can compress it you can heat it up and put it into a a block that can then be put back into pellets and recycled and so we don't need this stuff in our landfills why not give it a second use and you can do so many cool things with this stuff i'm going to show how i'm using a leaf blower vacuum to vacuum up the styrofoam i've got a two inch hose connected to the back of it to take it right into the drum to fill it up here i'm blowing in the styrofoam right into the ceiling roof floor cavity and this thing just sucks it up fills that whole cavity and you can treat styrofoam with borax and boric acid and fiery make it a fire resistant mix here i'm blowing it into the wall with a cloth material you can see how it's filling up works great so that's my shredder forty dollars for the lawnmower thirty dollars for the barrel you may have some six inch duct that's not very expensive at home depot i had the plywood and the screening already and put this thing together for a hundred bucks that is a wonderful shredder and if you're going to be doing this you need to have a setup that you can crank out a bunch of shredded styrofoam so good luck with your projects i'm sure there are folks that can come up with some really interesting improvements to this design and would love to see those wanna hear what you're doing with your shredded styrofoam good luck with your projects [Music] you

Channel: Stephen Williams

Views: 19,563

Rating: 4.9618683 out of 5

Keywords: Styrofoam Shredder, Shredder, styrofoam, EPS shredder, Expanded Polystyrene Shredder, DIY shredder

Id: _DBo9l9YuB0

Length: 18min 43sec (1123 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 01 2021