Cutting Chamber Design
There are three basic cutting-chamber designs: tangential, conventional and straight-drop, plus a hybrid model. The popular tangential design positions the rotor at an offset from the feed opening so that the feedstock is directed into the downward cut of the rotating knives at a tangent to the cutting circle. This cutting chamber provides a large “bite” radius, which is the most efficient way to achieve high throughput and clean regrind with bulky, thin-walled parts.
A straight-drop design feeds material perpendicular to the cutting circle and is recommended for thick-walled parts. Its “nibbling” bites are less likely to take too much material and perhaps stall the rotor. The hybrid model presents material to the knives at an angle somewhere between the first two and allows custom molders with a wide range of part sizes and shapes to process both thick- and thin-walled materials in the same machine.