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Not quite strictly pure woodworking stuff and a bit closer to odds I guess. Has anyone out there made a simple mulcher? I googled and only came upo with 2 designs, one using a barrel from a hand-push mower and one which set the mower motor and blades atop a plastic barrel and you feed the stuff to be shredded down a tube onto the top of the blades.
Would be interested if anybody has a pic or a design please, especially for using a barrel mower setup.
Thanks
Jeff
Don't lose hope yet. I'll try to get down into the backyard jungle when it dries out a bit & take some photos of the 'Mighty Mangler' that my late father bought - its in pieces at the moment, but that means I can get photos of the inside. It was supposed to have been a prototype for a small industrial shredder that didn't go ahead.
Basically a 3 hp motor spins a big solid steel disk with a couple of pivoted extensions and there is a hard steel bar bolted to the infeed chute. Anything pushed down the chute gets whacked by the extensions and slammed against the hard bar, resulting in shredded bits everywhere. There is a shroud around the whirling bits that directs the fragments down towards the ground.
The one the father has got a Modified Victor(not a kmart toy...) has just got a straight blade its about 12~15mm thick by 100mm high thats direct drive, has 2 slots cut in each end to make fingers, then inside the drum there are 2 sets of fingers that correspond with the ones on the blade, they have pretty generous clearance between them.
The drum is approx 500mm in dia and 120mm high all 6mm steel plate, driven by a 10hp honda. The drum sorta looks like a dust extractor fan housing, execpt the inlet would be directly onto the tips of the blades not in the middle.
This thing will chew through wet branches up to about 2" in dia!
Horses work well, goats for blackberries.