Hydraulic System Question, Anybody Know Hydraulics?

[kend]

I want to build a hydraulic unit to compact aluminum chips into pucks and I know very little about designing and building hydraulic systems. Is there anywhere online I can get a crash course of sorts? I'm not looking for an engineering degree, I just want to build this project and it have half a chance of working. Thanks

[GP100man]

I do know your talkin `bout enuff pressure to be talkin into the 10s or possibly the 100s of tons !!!

So it`s not a wknd project type of thang !!!

All the experience I have is around farm & shop equipment , maybe someone will chime in !

[CWME]

Curriosity got the best of me and I have to ask. Why? what are you going to do with pucks of al?

[Walter Laich]

I'm thinking that's the size and shape of his mold--but that's a WAG on my part

[SPRINGFIELDM141972]

Dealing with (engineering) hydraulic systems of any real size (Pressure) requires certain degree of hydraulic theory. Having said that, find a Womack hydraulics book. Womack is a hydraulics supplier and their catalog book is about as close to a quasi-technical guidebook as your going to find.

Be Safe,
Everett

[shaune509]

can you convert a log spliter to compress the scrap?
all hydro parts are there pump, cylinder, valve with relief and a strong frame. just make a containment chamber and ejector.
shaune509

[10-x]

Kend,
All you need may be a bottle jack, "I" or "H" beam and some 3" pipe. Depends on your "production quota". PM me.

[TCLouis]

Kend

What I hear/see in every post is that the devil is in the details and there are scant few details in your original post.

Everyone always says 'it ain't so without a picture', so I guess you are going to have to draw a picture in our minds with words.

[hickstick_10]

He probably wants one of these. For swarf.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEigDc58En8

Question is, how many tons of chips do you need to compact? And unless your running a machine shop, were are you getting the scrap metal from, cause the compactors are almost strictly the toy for fairly large shops.


The problem with a home brew set up, if you plan on shoveling your chips into a tube and crushing it down, your going to need a long die and a cylinder with a long stroke. Kinda like melting snow to make water, you got to fill the cup 3 or 4 times with snow to get a full cup of water.

You COULD, rig up a "mold" (pipe is not ideal) and plunger, cylinder, pump, control valve and tank, and pressure releif, and honestly if you explain this to the guys at the components shop, they can probably point you in the right direction.

My only recommendation is buy one of those units if you truly require it.

[kend]

I have a small 2 man machine shop and we generate quite a bit of aluminum chips but not nearly enough to justify spending the kind of money they want for a machine that does what I need. There is no production requirement but I don't want to spend all day making 1 brick. It really doesn't matter what size the puck is but I'm thinking 5 or 6 inch diameter but most anything will do. The scrapyard won't take aluminum chips as is but if I can make a brick they'll take'em. Melting would be too costly as the propane required would be expensive so I think a basic puck press would do it. And, it doesn't have to be squished solid, just a brick that will stay together. Any ideas other than hydraulics?

[hickstick_10]

This is news to me, I have never dealt with a scrapper that required the chips to be "pucked" before you brought it to them.

First idea would be change your scrap handler. If hes turning his nose up at loose clean aluminum chips there has to be other yards that will take it, some yards have a "bin rental" were they drop off the bin and you fill it with scrap, I bet ya if you filled a bin with clean aluminum they would be pretty accommodating. If the chips are fairly decent, they take it away for free. If the chips are dirty and mixed and swimming in old motor oil, you pay the bin rental.

If thats not an option, then there's nothing wrong with a press, but put a value on your time or paying your employee to turn say one ton of aluminum into chips into one ton of 5 inch compacted pucks, which have to be compacted densely enough to survive the pickup ride to the scrap yard. Putting in chips and compressing them with an electric power pack one at a time, will eat up man hours very fast.

But I would tell your scrapper to go urinate up a rope if hes that choosy.

If that doesn't work, most hydraulic component guys are pretty savvy on what you need to make a cylinder move in and out.

[Buckshot]

...........I'm not a hydraulics guy but a 30 ton bottle jack pressing on a contained 3" OD area will certainly flatten most objects very well. hickstick_10 mentioned time, but you didn't give any clue as to how much you have to do, nor how often, nor an idea of what you can afford to spend.

............Buckshot

[kend]

Changing scrap dealers isn't an option as there are only 2 here and both gave the same answer, they'll take any chips except aluminum because the chips generally vaporize when the hit the smelter. If it's a compressed brick they won't do it.
How much you have to do - one bucket to a drum full
How often - whenever we run an aluminum job
An idea of what you can afford to spend - I could afford $50k but my thought is you shouldn't have to. It goes back to about 99% of what we deal with on this forum, how to accomplish the same end result without spending a ton of money.

[10-x]

Ok, I see, you have "chips" from a lathe or mill you want to compress. By chance you are around St. Marys Ga I would forget about the "scrap dealers" around here. I called and asked what they were paying for scrap carbide, neither one knew what carbide was. LOL. Pretty sure one of the scrap yards in JAX will take them, but then not sure where you are.

[theperfessor]

I'm teaching a basic hydraulics class this semester for the 20th+ time. Designing a hydraulic circuit requires you to start at the output (work) end and go backwards to the input (motor/pump) end. How much force you have to apply and how fast you want to apply it determines everything else. The calculations aren't very hard but without knowing that much you're not going to get anywhere. If you can define that then maybe we can all help you out.

[bigdog454]

For the amount of chips that you have involved, I would find someone that has the ability to compress these chips and donate them. The cost in equipment and man hours seems to me to be more then the gain in scrap prices.

[Gelandangan]

+1 modify a Hydraulic log splitter.

[b2riesel]

I thought about this and today at work I welded up a metal box that was 5x3x3 and threw in some aluminum shavings from the lathe....using a 5 ton arbor press I put some in...packed it down...put some more in....packed it down...until it was tough pushing down....my ram on the arbor press has a threaded punch for pressing out various bearings...so I made a threaded 1/4 steel plate 5x3 to press down with.

After I made me a nice brick...I flashed it with the torch for a few seconds and it sealed up nicely...it isn't a solid smooth mass..looks more like a chipped plywood/particle board texture..but it isn't going to fall apart either.

[kend]

I thought about this and today at work I welded up a metal box that was 5x3x3 and threw in some aluminum shavings from the lathe....using a 5 ton arbor press I put some in...packed it down...put some more in....packed it down...until it was tough pushing down....my ram on the arbor press has a threaded punch for pressing out various bearings...so I made a threaded 1/4 steel plate 5x3 to press down with.

After I made me a nice brick...I flashed it with the torch for a few seconds and it sealed up nicely...it isn't a solid smooth mass..looks more like a chipped plywood/particle board texture..but it isn't going to fall apart either.

That's exactly the "brick" I was looking for! I think a log splitter would do the trick but I don't have one to play with. I found a hydraulic pump/tank unit on an old machine we had that I think will work for initial testing, I'm trying to round up a hydraulic cylinder so I can throw something together to try.

[scrapcan]

make a tube with a funnel on top of one section, then a section for comperssion. fill the funnel/hopper compress, retract, let it fill some more compress, repeat. Make the end of the compression chamber so it has a heavy/thick removable gate so you can push the puck/cube out when it gets ot a length you like.

Set your hydraulic bypass to a pressure that the form can withstand, so that when you compact it hits the bypass before it makes a mess. Put a pressure guage on the high pressure side of the supply at pump and at the ram. You can then watch the pressure spike at the ram that you may not see at the pump outlet.

that is all jsut my uneducated observations from having dealt with a few contrived pieces of hydraulic equipment.

[bigdog454]

Go to the junk yard and get a hyd cylinder from a garbage truck