Five years ago, when Scott McMorran became Business Manager of Premier Wood, a contract wood machining company based in Dandenong, Victoria, he decided to start his new role with an essential purchase.
Although Premier Wood was already using a Weima WL 4 single shaft shredder with open top hopper, the manual work that was necessary to deal with long and thin offcuts highlighted the need for another solution, and he decided to purchase the Weima horizontal shredder WLH Tiger. Even five years after the arrival of the WLH Tiger, McMorran confirms that the investment paid off. “The horizontal machine is absolutely brilliant for us” he says when asked about his experience.
As a contract wood machining company, Premier Wood’s customers deliver timber which McMorran and his team processes to the desired specifications before sending it back. One of the company’s many services of machining and processing timber is multi-ripping, where long and thin wood pieces are necessary offcuts.
While the WL4 shredder with open top hopper reliably shreds many kinds and various sizes of offcuts , long and thin pieces can tend to protrude out of the hopper and break, or bridge over the shredding rotor. And when the pusher, which feeds material to the shredding rotor, retracts, there is no effective cutting until it returns to push the thin pieces against the knives of the rotor.
So before the arrival of the horizontal shredder, the long offcuts were dealt with manually by gathering in a stillage. When the stillage was full, or time allowed, the offcuts had to be cut into lengths that allowed more efficient processing in the WL 4 shredder. This time-consuming job needed improving to enable higher efficiency and to end the disruption of other processes. “We want to keep going, we want to be as efficient as we can,” said McMorran about the main driver behind his decision.
The Weima WLH Tiger horizontal shredder guarantees exactly that and substitutes the previously laborious work with smooth in-line processing. The machine features a long vibrating table which automatically feeds the offcuts into a pinch roller. And the pinch roller draws the material against the horizontal shredder rotor, which is equipped with the cutting knives. This ensures optimum feeding and high throughput.
Fully automatic, the horizontal shredder sits at the end of the multi-ripping unit. After the timber has been processed, the offcuts get fed onto the vibrating table into the opening of the WLH Tiger horizontal shredder.
Weima offers a range of models available for horizontal shredding. Also the widths of the machines vary to allow shredding of various sizes of wide board skeleton after the CNC cutting. This is ideal for automation as the skeleton can be transferred from CNC machines directly and fed into the Weima horizontal shredder without any manhandling.
Here are some video links that showcase the process:
- Weima Tiger 400 shredding long wood strips:
- Weima Tiger 1800 shredding MDF boards:
- Weima Tiger 1800 shredding CNC waste :
The machine has been in use the last five years, and McMorran can’t report a single issue. With only basic preventative maintenance and without any expert operators, McMorran can count on the machine’s reliability: “When we are working, the shredders are working.”
Premier Wood now uses two Weima shredders that complement each other perfectly. The horizontal WLH400 Tiger shreds long and thin offcuts and the top feeding WL4 deals with short ones. “We’ve been flat out and this equipment is an important part of keeping it going,” McMorran concludes.
CEMAC technologies represents WEIMA in Australia.
CEMAC technologies
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