Hello From Baltimore, Maryland

Geez, I'm getting around lately... Seems I had to run out to Maryland on an emergency basis to repair one of our machines.

This is what our motor-starter runs, a metal shredder, or Hammer Mill. You can put a car in on one side (engine block and all) and you get a shredded wheat version on the outbound side.

Here is our motor starter inside the building.

And here is where I worked to put things back in order.

Another view of the work area.

The power for the motor power supply was pretty weak, so a UPS was installed (the black thing). The installation is temporary until the rack that was ordered comes in.

This is the minimum size of transformer we need to run this 4000hp motor.

And this is the kind of fuse it takes too. They make 'em kinda big, don't they?

Here's the outbound side of the shredder. The only way somebody could be standing here is when the machine is turned off, because all kinds of stuff comes flying out of this thing while it's beating stuff into little bitty pieces.

Well, before we can start that 4000hp motor, the hammer mill has been opened up so the junk that is still stuck in it can be cleaned out.

Here is a pile of what comes out of the shredder. Click on the image for a larger view and see if you can guess what some of this stuff might have been before it took a trip through the hammer mill. Kinda tough to identify, huh?

Yeah, lots of this shredded stuff is piled up all over the place...

Here's a magnet crane, being used to sweep the roadway of metal pieces. It actually works pretty good.

Here is where a capacitor bank was once connected to the motor cables. This was disconnected because they aren't supposed to be hooked up when a soft starter motor controller is used.


And, there were surge capacitors up inside the motor connection box too. The surge cap had also been disconnected, so that everything will work out fine when we go to start the motor. On the next start attempt, the shredder came all the way up to speed and was put into action so it could start 'eating' cars again...