Cutter Rebuilds

As a shredder is used it gradually wears down cutters and, over time, its shearing efficiency diminishes. The obvious solution is to periodically replace the cutters with new ones. SSI offers a cost effective alternative: rebuilt cutters. Experience has shown that rebuilt cutters actually last longer than the original because of the additional hardness.

How We Rebuild Cutters

We first inspect the returned cutters to determine what the overall spacing and thicknesses will be after rebuilding. Usually enough metal is ground off to add an additional cutter and spacer to the stack. We also determine whether any of the cutters are unsalvageable.

Depending on the shredder application, a specific hardfacing wire is welded onto the cutter face, TW3 wire for high abrasion/low impact applications like tire shredding, or RW1 wire for high impact applications that may see non-shreddables.

The cutters then go through several processes where the edges are built back up. The outer diameters are ground to match the original contour, and then the sides are ground to make them flat and achieve proper thickness dimensions for restacking. The spacers are then also ground so that cutter to cutter shear gaps are brought back to original specification.

Typically one new cutter and one new spacer are added to the stack to compensate for the material that has been ground off. Cutters can usually be rebuilt several times using this process.