Diy Disc Screener

[sum1]

Anyone ever made their own disc Screener similar to the one below.

My homemade firewood disc cleaner save thousands by making one yourself keep your customers happy - YouTube 

Started pricing out the parts and I think the material is about 1/4 the price of the ones some companies are selling. 

I'm not sure about a few things like hydraulic motor size. It appears most of these units rotate at about 60 rpm. How much torque is really required? 

[mike_belben]

It would be dramatically easier to make a grate shaker.  


Take some 1" sch 40 pipe and weld up a frame like a bbq grill or fridge rack oriented the way the wood will flow.   Its gonna be low at the far end, naturally to create a low pitched slide.  Maybe 1/12 or 2/12

  The low end sits on some captured coil springs. Diesel valve springs or chopped econobox coils etc.  The tall end has a homemade eccentric shaft to create the shake. Heres how to build that... 

 So lets say your motor is coupled to a 1" shaft.  Get some 2" bearings and some 2" steel hockey puck cutoffs.  Now you bore 1" holes offset in the pucks.  Weld them to the 1" shaft.  Brazing would probably come out truer than weld but whatever.  Now youve got round cam lobes on the 1" shaft.  The 2" bearings go on the 2" lobes and bolt to the grate framework. 


 that makes the grate assembly shake real fast.  The wood just jiggles on down to the conveyor pickup.  Its not gonna rip bark off but its easier than that style to build and itll jostle the trash through the grates. 

[sum1]

 

 

 

[mike_belben]

Beautiful job!

[sum1]

Had it running today for the first time. Just needs some hooks for hanging super sacks for the junk. Very pleased at the function and cost.



 

[mike_belben]

What are you gonna do with the spoils that it needs to go in supersacks?

[sum1]

Going to try and sell it. I already sell my saw dust in super sacs. I cut lots of birch and give small bags of the bark away to customers currently. I don't think I will bother with the other species bark and junk.

[Old Greenhorn]

Sure would love to see a video of this running and some detail photos. Are those square discs? DO they all turn the same direction? What size motor did you settle on and how is that working for you? Does this have a vibration function in it?
 Nicely done!

[moodnacreek]

That type of separator has been around for some time. It takes many pieces to make one up and I think that is why you don't see them often. Apparently it is the way to go. It always surprised me they don't jam up.   I have wondered about using a step feeder for a loading conveyer that would loose the small pieces.  There has to be a way to build a firewood loading conveyer that does it all.

[mike_belben]

a bar grate shaker trough.  One end has a spinning eccentric shaft and the other has fiberglass reeds so the trough cams as much side to side as up and down.  Its a lot less parts than the tab and shaft style show but probably doesnt pluck quite as much bark off.

I worked on linkbelt lead conveyance systems that my dad installed when i was just a wee lad. They were fiberglass reed horizontal troughs like this and they ran for decades straight on a shot of grease now and then.  Only had one apart once in ten years other than a belt or motor, and it was a bad grease zerks fault.

[Hilltop366]

So lets say your motor is coupled to a 1" shaft.  Get some 2" bearings and some 2" steel hockey puck cutoffs.  Now you bore 1" holes offset in the pucks.  Weld them to the 1" shaft.  Brazing would probably come out truer than weld but whatever.  Now youve got round cam lobes on the 1" shaft.  The 2" bearings go on the 2" lobes and bolt to the grate framework.

I have seen some DIY shakers that used a straight shaft with another piece of steel welded on the side of the shaft to make it unbalanced and shake. Would that be as effective as a cam?

Nice job on the disc screener sum1!

[mike_belben]

Good idea, will work for a dirt screen but in practice ive found its not at all close to an eccentric shaft shaker, that i think wood will require for good cleaning. 

It takes violence to shake bark free and give it clearance to fall out.  Woods gotta be dancing hard like a trommel or this plate plucker.  Theyre both great machines at the task, but a bit labor intensive or expensive to build unless you have an ironworker or plasma table. Lots of bearings, sprockets, chains, shafts and cutting drilling of the plates, or a lot of linear feet of flat strip and difficult to backyard roll perfect round rings to build a trommel.











A shakeweight is how i built my vibratory pto roller.  Ive since added a 2nd shake weight identical to the first and its not much better.  They have to spin really fast to get the HZ for good compaction (which is unnerving to stand near incase boom) but with a fixed gear transmission that high rpm makes me go over the ground too fast.  It would work better if i used a dif as a speed increaser and a lineshaft covered in offset weights, and the carriage was hydrostatic for anytime forward and reverse or infinite slow.  Every shift is 20 seconds of waiting for the gear train to come to a halt.


This was kinda just a test with junk i had.  Itll get repurposed in a good one made with the education this quickie gave me. It does compact fairly well just slow.

[mike_belben]

Going to try and sell it. I already sell my saw dust in super sacs. I cut lots of birch and give small bags of the bark away to customers currently. I don't think I will bother with the other species bark and junk.

If you throw some punky rotten forest wood with white fuzz ontop each sack and leave em sit in the rain until they get white and fuzzy too, you will have an epic fungally dominated garden mulch/compost. 

 This will produce excellent garden results when all exposed soil is covered in it, and the micorhizal fungi will bond with plant roots in a symbiotic relationship.  This is how giant punpkins are grown actually.  
Organic "marget gardeners" are the crowd who will buy this.  I follow a guy in quebec who pays $2000 a dumptruck load for a really good compost he could make himself but makes his money filling vegetables into his CSA orders.  You will find these growers at farmers markets and on facebook doing farm to table delivery orders and stuff like that.


Put the fuzzy rotten forest wood and leaf litter ontop then pour some form of liquid sugar on top. Watered down honey, syrup, mollasses, soda.  Whatever.  The fungus needs sugars.  Feed them and itll break down much faster. Ants will actually help speed the breakdown into good compost but you may not want to put ants in the bag.  I think itd be better to make the compost in a bulk pile then fill into bag when finished, if you can get enough money.  It is an aerobic process so it wants oxygen throughout the pile. But disrupting the pile slows the fungi so these are the piles that usually use blowers and air pipes underneath. 

[Hilltop366]

Good idea, will work for a dirt screen but in practice ive found its not at all close to an eccentric shaft shaker, that i think wood will require for good cleaning.

It takes violence to shake bark free and give it clearance to fall out.  Woods gotta be dancing hard like a trommel or this plate plucker.  Theyre both great machines at the task, but a bit labor intensive or expensive to build unless you have an ironworker or plasma table. Lots of bearings, sprockets, chains, shafts and cutting drilling of the plates, or a lot of linear feet of flat strip and difficult to backyard roll perfect round rings to build a trommel.











A shakeweight is how i built my vibratory pto roller.  Ive since added a 2nd shake weight identical to the first and its not much better.  They have to spin really fast to get the HZ for good compaction (which is unnerving to stand near incase boom) but with a fixed gear transmission that high rpm makes me go over the ground too fast.  It would work better if i used a dif as a speed increaser and a lineshaft covered in offset weights, and the carriage was hydrostatic for anytime forward and reverse or infinite slow.  Every shift is 20 seconds of waiting for the gear train to come to a halt.


This was kinda just a test with junk i had.  Itll get repurposed in a good one made with the education this quickie gave me. It does compact fairly well just slow.

The ones I have seen were a long shaft across the frame with another long "shaft" welded to it, I'm having trouble seeing the difference in the end results between that and a off centre shaft.

[mike_belben]

The size of the travel in the screening rack.  A modest shakeweight can only really dance the rack when its not loaded heavily.  If it clogs up the mass of wood will dampen the vibration.  

With an offset camming action from an eccentric bearing opposite the hinge point, that screen is going up and down a full inch no matter how much junk piles ontop and will immediately dive under and over and back up again. If the motor is spinning the load is flying up in the air.  


It was pretty amazing the lead clods that linkbelt reed shaker moved this way.  When i had to climb in and air chisel ranges the conveyor would have half a drum of lead bricks piled on it.  Turn it on and watch them clear right out.  A vibratory shaker would just make noise.  The shake weight mass could never compete with the lead mass.  This eccentric mimics a crankshaft and connecting rod big end motion if im not being clear.  It physically gyrates the screen around a crank throw.


I cant say a shakeweight shaft is insufficient for a wood cleaner, maybe it is ive never seen one.  Im only comparing the two styles.  An eccentric has more shake than a comparable mass shakeweight and its no harder to build.  Vibratory is fine in a walkbehind plate compactor but if you decide youre gonna stand on that compactor and ride it, suddenly you dont have enough shake because its been dampened by your mass.  It would need a larger shaker shaft.  Theyre really just a crank with one throw, no counterweight or rod inside an oil filled splash housing with 2 bearings and seals.

[OH logger]

I have an ABS disk cleaner after building a grate on an adjustable angle. No vibrating or shaking factor to it but the disk cleaner is WAY more effective. Especially cleaning dry wood out of the pile on concrete. I trade my cleanings to my buddy with a mulch business for free mulch to put around my house. It's a win win 

[Hilltop366]

So Mike the one you are describing with a cam is connected from the main frame to the screen frame to physically shake the screen?

Sorry I didn't think of that earlier my brain was stuck on a weight type shaker.

[mike_belben]

Yeah.. I have a small commercial one for shaking lead from bank sand, i will take pics of tomorrow.

[sum1]

A couple videos as requested.

The top view is showing some poplar cull logs I got from a mill. They are dry and not much junk.

The side view is right after a dumped a tractor bucket of birch bark and wood from a condensed pile I had in the yard before the cleaner. Approx 70 cord birch picked thru by hand condensed into 10-15 of junk and some wood. Some larger pieces of birch bark are able to get thru still.

Homemade Firewood Disc Screener - YouTube

DIY Firewood Screener - YouTube

[mike_belben]

Sorry for the delay on the pics.  















Notice the coil spring pivots and the shaft with 4 bearings. The outer two bearings are on the frame while the inner two bearing hold the basket.  The inners have a cam circle inside them.  Id offset bore some pucks and weld or lock them to the shaft to recreate this.

[Hilltop366]

Makes sense now Mike, thanks.

Looks like it works well Sum1, great job.