Satans food processor update 2, the granulation

 Lots goin on in the shop this week.

Operating cash very low, lots of receivables.

I watched this video below.  It is in Spanish, and I happen to speak Spanish, so I could understand most of what he was sayin.  The gist of it was that I need to add in plastic gradually, not big mass at once.  Let it build heat, add more plastic that is cooler so the heat will add to the colder plastic coming in.  It will behave like a dough.  Once it gets to be a dough like you would have for a cement mortar, or snowball you can pack together but not super wet, then it is close.  You then dump in some of a previous batch that is granulated and cooled.  

This will pull the heat out of the dough, solidify it enough where it will start to break apart, hit the blades and turn into a crumble mixture.  You let it run for a small amount of time to get a nice crumble.  Then open the discharge gate and let it blow out.  

It is tricky not to over mix it or you will get a stuck together mass of plastic in the machine.  If that happens, put on some gloves, turn the motor off and manually pull out the big chunks.  put aside to cool and you can run them thru later to get broken apart in the machine in another run.

You can add in your coloring pigment at this time also.  If using for example some cheap charcoal, you only need to dump in the lumps and the machine will grind and mix it in the batch.

Unfortunately the testing had to stop today as either the new pulley came loose, or the bearing siezed up.  I suspect my guys did not grease the bearing like they was instructed, or the key fell out.  Will disassemble after it cools down.  

At the moment in the office, fresh change of clothes, waiting for customer meeting, so I can not do experiments without getting filthy again.

Satans food processor update. With pictures and video

Top flake before, bottom after 7 min.  

Unfortunately the key of the pulley fell off.  Which let the pulley spin on the shaft and it wore the center of the pulley out.  But I did have a double belt pulley ready to go, but by this time is was 6pm, getting dark and we was tired.  

Hopefully with the new pulley, and double belt cause the single belt was slipping will get better results.  

The material lost half its volume in 7 min.  The commercial machines are supposed to make it turn to a sand like texture, and flow easily in a hopper so we shall see if this mornings experiments give the desired results.  

I did run a previous batch, but again I unknowingly had the belt slipping and it was not at its full RPM so the results were okay, not quite the desired results.  That plastic was a bit wet however and there was a lot of steam being released.    I also did not take any pics and video of that run.

It was a large volume processed however.