Chip Master

Using Waste for Profit

Improving efficiency in any company can be a major challenge. One way for a company, such as a machine shop, to increase their efficiency is to purchase a Chip Master. The main goal of a Chip Master is to increase waste revenue from chips from metal machining equipment by compressing them into pucks to be recycled. The value of a puck can be as high as 78% greater than the value of chips by weight (Arnold, 20010).

The Chip Master creates pucks in order to increase the amount of metal that gets recycled. The chips do not recycle well because when they are smelted they turn to vapor instead of recycled material. The pucks are worth more because they are denser and less metal is wasted compared to chips. The functioning of the Chip Master is efficient and creates a quick payback.

The development of pucks includes first making the chips in a machining station followed by transporting the chips to the Chip Master or have a smaller Chip Master directly attached to the machine by an auger. Having it directly attached eliminates an extra handling step. The drawback to having it directly attached is having multiple augers or multiple Chip Masters. One Chip Master to one machine solution should only be considered with a high volume of chips. Whether one machine or multiple machines are feeding chips to the Chip Master the chips must enter a hopper. The hopper size is determined by the amount of machines feeding it or the size of the chip transfer bin from multiple machines. After leaving the hopper the chips are transferred into a pre-pack chamber that reduces the volume of the chips 3 to 1 (Mittler, 2009). This is especially useful with long stringy chips from big drills or other large lathing operations.

The pre-pack operation happens in unison with the main compaction chamber; therefore no time is wasted.

After the pre-pack chamber the semi-finished puck is moved into the main compaction chamber where as much as 94 tons of...