I’ve been spending a lot of time lately breaking up hard styrafoam, the kind used to pack electrical appliances, computers, ect…, into small peices to be used to pack books in boxes.
Doing it by hand is very time consuming and boring. Has anybody figured out a good way to do this quickly?
Have you experimented with your food processor?
I’m a bit confused. Books tend to fill up a box nicely, without any styrofoam… but to answer your O.P., take a few pieces, shove them into a large grocery store bag. Close the bag a bit, and kneel on said bag. The large bits of styrofoam will break up, the smaller airborne crumbs will be trapped in the paper bag.
Open paper bag, take out bigger bits, use at will. Good luck with the move, remember- strapping tape is your friend. 
Cartooniverse
Dow Chemical
Well that’s a good start. I’m learning stuff already, even if we haven’t gotten to a solution yet.
Walloon,
I guess I’m not really talking about styrofoam, which I now know how to spell. But rather, “molded expanded polystyrene beads” or something like that.
Cartooniverse,
To clarify, I’m talking about packing books to be mailed overseas. You need to pack them with something to protect them from damage. Its got to insulate the books from shock and its got to be light (that rules out crumpled newspaper) It’s not like packing them for a move, where you have controll as to how the boxes are going to be handled, hopefully.
ZipperJJ,
As far as experimenting, well I don’t have a food processor. Besides, that sounds like a really messy experiment and I really don’t think that would work. But I would be happy to hear a report from someone who has such a contraption at his/her disposal.
My current method is similar to what you Cartooniverse suggests, except I don’t use a bag. The problem is that the big pieces have to be broken up more and this involves tearing little pieces off by hand, which is really time consuming and hurts my fingers when we are dealing with a particularly course variety of “molded beads”.
Any other ideas?
Have you tied a rasp (like a harsh file) to make really small bits?
A saw to cut them up?
Tried running them over in your car a few times?
At first it would seem to be a simple engineering problem but after researching molded expanded polystyrene a bit, there is no really easy solution. It is 95% air. You can cut it up, but that involves more time and energy than breaking it. You cannot crush it in a ball mill (imagine a cement mixer with a cannonball inside) because the polystyrene will immediately cushion the blow. There is a commercial ‘chipper’ for the stuff, but it doesn’t sound like you want to give up the book business to chip polystyrene professionally. Shipping the books in a container and packaging them once they arrive overseas doesn’t seem a viable alternative either.
I can only think of two reasonable solutions, not including your continuing to do what you are doing. First, try to talk the local polystyrene manufacturer or recycler into trading your chunks for manufactured peanuts or cutting it up for you.
The other alternative is to see if the cost of a small polystyrene foam injector is less than the cost of labor over the long haul. If it is, seal the books in plastic bags and inject the foam around them to fill the box.
The way I do it is to go to a store that specializes in packing things and either have them pack it, or buy Styrofoam “popcorn” from them.
Any books I have ever bought (from Amazon or others) have always been tightly bound in stiff cardboard and NO internal packing materials. I have never had a problem with anything being damaged, and I have bought books from all over the world.
Perhaps you should look at this method of packing rather than the ‘fill-it-up’ style.
OTOH, if you are sticking to this method and you have many, many books to pack, invest in a little hot-wire cutter and buy sheets of expanded polystyerene. These can them be cut easily to any size to suit your packing needs.
An electric carving knife will slice it quite nicely but will make a little mess that you wouldn’t get with a hot-wire cutter. If you don’t have an electric carving knife then maybe a good serrated bread knife would do, or a hacksaw blade.
Any of the above should enable you to produce thinnish uniform slices which is what you want for lining a carton.
*Paging Ron Popeil . . . Paging Ron Popeil . . . *
I see an opportunity for another great Ronco product.
*It slices, it dices . . . *
Coming soon to an infomercial to you.
Chopping up styrofoam via food processor or wood chipper would only multiply the problem by introducing air into the equation. Not only would it seem to have greater volume because of the air, it would blow all over the place. Think about sawdust.
Many years ago there was an (I think) environmentalist on some late night talk show griping about how styrofoam was a bane to our existance. I think his main gripe was that it’s mainly just air and tends to waste a lot of space in landfills. His solution was to disolve it with some chemicals, I think he used acetone in his demonstration. He dumped a huge amount of styrofoam peanuts into one of those huge 100 gallon fishtanks that had about an inch of acetone in it, and all the peanuts dissolved into the solution, with no (apparent) increase in the volume of the solution.
Two questions I have now (I was too young to have questions when I first saw this):
I have a feeling that this is how polystyrene cement is made.
I recently had to break up large blocks of “molded expanded polystyrene beads” into chunks small enough that I could discard without taking all the volume of my trash cans.
I first tried a camping bow-saw, which cut efficently and agressively but left tiny chunks blowing around my garage.
I then tried my band-saw, with a 1/4 inch 4tpi blade. I set up the fence two inches from the blade and was shortly cutting it up into two inch strips and then two inch cubes. As I didn’t want to contaminate the wood dust/chips in my dust collector, I hooked my shop vac into the saw’s dust port. It didnt’ quite have enough oomph, so I had to wear a dust mask and there was some cleanup afterwards. But unlike the debris from the bow-saw, this dust was fine enough that it pretty much stayed where it settled.
All that being said, if I was in your position, I’d head to the office supply store and buy one of those huge bags of molded expanded polystyrene bead packing peanuts and use them to pack your books.
Your right about that. But I would be curious to know how these things work. Smashing, cutting, slicing, tearing?
Maybe a food processor is out but maybe a lawn mower would do the trick as long as it was a bagging mower. Chop up the bits into various sized pieces and the suction from the mower inhales all the bits into a bag.
[sub]NOTE: I’m not sure if I’m joking here or not but I’d be interested to hear the result if anyone tries it.[/sub]
MY experience is that Amazon uses those plastic sheets with air bubbles. But your right, they don’t use a lot of it, and sometimes none at all. The key is to pack it tightly. The problem is getting the right sized box so that the books can be packed in tightly without using a lot of cardbord to fill the empty spaces. If there is a lot of space to fill in, the weight of the cardboard will add to the cost of the shipping. But if you are not Amazon you can’t always get the right sized box and using lots of lightweight filler is neccessary.
We would like to avoid “buying” the “popcorn” stuff if possible. So we are still breaking up the stuff by hand.
ZipperJJ and Whack-a-Mole took both of my ideas, so how about this…
Instead of breaking up the polystyrene into small chunks, can you use larger pieces to wedge between the book(s) and the sides of the box? It would require fewer (though more precise) cuts, but it might not be possible depending on how big the polystyrene pieces are to begin with.
If not, how about a wood chipper?
Kewl, Servo!
A wood chipper crossed my mind, too.
The main problem I see is that styro-poly-styrene-whatever is attracted to a static charge. The smaller the pieces, the more “sticky” the stuff seems to get.
Could you either OIL the chipper blades, or maybe give them a squirt of cooking no-stick spray??
~VOW
Servo, good suggestion. Yes. We do that also. But sometimes to make the fill perfect you’ve got to have small pieces to fit into irregular spaces.
I’m not sure what you mean by a wood chipper. Is that one of those bigg machines used to make sawdust? If so, that would be overkill.
Vow, We definitely don’t want oil or any other liquid ANYWHERE NEAR this operation!