Modding A Paper Shredder

detaks writes "The university of alberta's undergraduate computing science student group modded the office shredder, with duct tape, 110volt case fans, and a athlon fan, to increase the speed of the paper shredder from 12 to 37 pages shredded before overheating. You can also read it in the google cache"

V8 chainsaw...

[FyRE666]

This story reminds me of the vid clip I saw on this page [punchbaby.com]. Totally pointless, but very cool - I've never seen anything chop through wood quite so quick - and the sound it makes it almost worth the effort...

A great overclocking project

[abirdman]

They demonstrated a tripling of the throughput of the machine with those soup-it-up fans! That's impressive. I'll bet that's better than the fan-and-heatsink donor got from his Athlon. It's too bad they couldn't get that "1 Roll eXtreme Duck Tape" to physically support the twin 120 volt fans to really cool off the beast. My experience with these (shredder) devices is that there is another metric besides raw throughput that makes all the difference in perceived "beastliness", and that's the speed of the feeder, analogous to the "first page" speed of a printer, except obviously the opposite. And as long as they have to run 120 VAC to it, they can add all sorts of lights and stuff. (For more 120 VAC computer projects, see etherkillers [fiftythree.org]). Maybe with some tweaking they can hack a truly useful device that attaches to the output bin of a fast printer, and shreds as fast as the pages come out. Then they can haul away the incriminating evidence as fast as it's output.