welcome to talking tires the podcast that delves deep into the world of tires join us as we explore everything from the science behind the manufacturing to the latest Innovations intire recycling our aim is to provide you with a comprehensive understanding of tires including how they work how to maintain them and how to dispose of them responsibly whether you’re a season mechanic curious car Enthusiast or an avid recycler talking tires is the per perfect podcast for anyone who wants to learn about the essential component of the modern vehicle and heavy equipment so buckle up and join us for an informative and engaging journey into the world of tires welcome to another episode of talking tires I’m Craig Hunter your host president of Tire reclaim I’m here with Jay and Merlin and we’re going to do a little tour of our new facility we’re super excited about from Joe Mar Machining and Fabrication and we’re here to tour it for the first time and talk a little bit bit about how it works Jay why don’t you tell us a little bit more about what we’re going to do today well today we’re going to be

walking around checking out our new tire uh shredding machine and Merlin’s going to tell us about some stats and some throughputs and how much power it all has so it’s going to be pretty exciting all right well then let’s go for a walk I was able to learn a little bit more about the company and it got started way back in 19 I want to say ‘ 91 and 96 then inch got started and then uh there was a buyou in 2007 and just all one big Happ happy family there in middleberry Indiana so you’ve been there from the beginning right you your brothers Lamar and Buster and uh tell me a little bit about that experience there in middleberry uh we started as a small Job Shop just welding anything that came in the door in 1991 and Dad and brothers actually were in it like a year before I got started and it’s probably about 5 years eight years before Buster got into it and yeah we worked for leavon ever since he started his own company we were building little conveyors and little this and little that then Lavon wanted to

build shredders and we didn’t want to get into the computerized equipment so we opted to sell in 2007 we opted to sell and then it just snowballed from there blossomed from there right on y That’s a good story so i’ I’d say that uh well I hate to steal this but Marilyn you’re the magician so you’re the here you’re the boots on the ground obviously they have a lot of trust in you to be out here and or organizing something like this so I know uh Buster wanted to make it out but he wasn’t feeling well so shout out to Buster man that a hardworking dude right there and and I’m sure a lot of what’s being built they’re put together here has his hands on it so we thank him and Lamar we have a really good crew bag of jar that work really hard putting this all together so everybody works together to make it happen it’s not just one person that’s great so uh what do we got behind us this first piece right here what does it do first piece is the TC 500 infeed conveyor so we call it

our bulk feeder we can dump bulk tires in there with a skid loader a front end loader or whatever and it’ll take it up the conveyor go inside to the TC 500 which stands for tire chipper 500 two 250 horsepower machines Motors that shred the tires up into a 3-in chunk I love it I love it is so there’s a lot of customers that have tires and chips and I see this one’s guarded so we could potentially load two different types of material on this conveyor right correct some people do a single pass and then that’s basically a tear cut in half and then they also feed that in there but it’ll Al it’ll take anything we got side skirting on it so it’ll take any type of tire Chip you can put in there yeah I’m super impressed with everything you guys build so you buil all these back in uh Indiana correct correct and um uh tell us a little bit about your Workforce there uh we have 85 people working there uh anything from Machining sand blasting and painting just basically whatever it takes to build the whole thing we

have robots all built in the USA all in the USA I love it I love it it’s very wellb built machine looks like it’s very maintainable also yes so it’s not going to be too hard to change any parts or pieces on it in the future so everything you see here we have in stock at joart so I love it that’ll be good so less downtime with jar yes maybe we’ll head up and uh see the the chipper now we’re up here at the chipper now Merlin can tell us a little bit about this thing what’s a what kind of horsepower does it have and uh it’s 500 horsepower it’s two 250 horse motors one on each end it has two shavs uh we can show you where the turs go through and in the last 3 weeks you guys put in this thing there I noticed that there’s no Hydraulics anywhere that I can see why is that we trade hydraulic machines uh back in the day they were good because we didn’t have the vfd technology for forward and reverse okay so now with the vfd technology uh the vfd will take

care of everything and so it’s about it getting stuck and it can go backwards and go forwards and it can monitor all that kind of stuff of course we we won’t ever have any leaks cuz uh right cuz there’s no pressurized hoses or anything like that to go bad uh anytime you go through a mechanical or Hydraulics or or whatever you lose a little bit of power so you lose more power going through Hydraulics than you do with the gearboxes I love it I love it so these rollers in here uh pretty large how much does one of them weigh how many teeth does it have I think we have 27 teeth and they’re about 2 and 3/4 in wide so tell us what this thing does Merlin the PC and the TG have the same base frame everything’s the same horsepower everything looks to change the parts are interchangeable so the chips from the TC are going to be 3 to 4 in depending on screen size they’ll come in with this machine then it’ll have to go through like an inch and eight screen then once it goes through the inch

and8 screen it’ll land onto a vibrating table and then a 4ft magnet and that’s our first wire rubber separation a 4T magnet then the good stuff will go into the drad that’ll have to go through a 3/16 to a/4 in screen and then it’ll go through an across an 8ft magnet and then it’ll go out for good wire then there’s a portion of it that’ll get returned back into the loop and come back in and ground down a little bit further so that would be what a lot of folks consider a TDA or a tdf product you can have a 3/4 or 1 in somewhat wire free not completely wire free after this stage right so you probably had machines set up throughout the country that maybe just go this far to to make tdf yes each machine we have separate in different locations but it’s coming to or if the customer’s in the business they see they need to get rid of the rubber so they grind it on down further to tdf or to like the 10 ton or whatever so right the finer stuff and then we’ll and

we’ll move on to the Cracker Mill in a moment just wanted to point out that this is a is also a diversion area where we can divert 3/4 to 1 in material and still Liberate the steel being offshoot another Direction correct correct yeah this machine will always liberate your steel you can’t a lot of it you can’t bypass that the majority of it correct right and that’s all underneath us the big magnet in the Shaker table uh Merlin I noticed that big gigantic bin right there can you tell us what that bends for and the purpose of it the bends for surge so if you back a semi-trailer up to the infeed conveyor you know you can unload it really fast and then you can fill that bin up then the TG is more of a consistent it wants consistent feed to is there any other reasons why you guys have that bin there 100% for surge capacity for just a little lag time to get that unload truck unloaded gotcha otherwise you’d have to have a tire stacked literally 6 in apart consistently all day long every day we have one

machine at our sister company that does that but nobody else does that everybody wants does it just not even have that bin or we literally have like underneath we probably have 500 lb capacity at our entech location I love it I like this the system set up pretty nice on this side I’m starting to see a lot of ducting work um what is all that for they’ll always have fiber when you do car tires so it’s pull out the fiber and the very fine dust so it doesn’t get all over the building and all over the floor okay awesome yeah should we move on okay we’re standing on top of a a red piece on our catwalk and uh it’s a bin um a storage bin Marlin can you tell us what that’s about the storage bin is again for Surge from the TG into the cracker Mill so we want a little bit of surge the cracker Mill always likes to run with a full head on it so we want surge in the bin and right behind us on the right side there’s another bin where we can supplement into if we

don’t have enough feed from the TG oh okay and we could also still run this side if uh if we wanted change out a a shredder roller right yes you can put it in the surge bin right behind us okay yeah the infeed bin and just keep going if we need to correct that’s that’s really cool uh Ingenuity and Engineering there I have everything set up where you can run the TC and the TG are tied together but these two can be separated with how you do your augers I love it I love hey I wanted to take a moment and point out this beautiful catwalk we’ve been talking walking around on so this is not standard equipment right so if you get a pan over here guys you can see the all of the catwalk basically moving through the all the equipment and gives us a nice Bird’s eyee view of everything uh you don’t see those every day do you Merlin they’re not all tied together but we all have some catwalks but tied together and being able to walk on top through all the machine very few customers have that it’s

exciting pretty complex process the cracker Mill can you explain to us a little bit about how you guys came up with uh that idea to Cracker Mill is like an old terminology that they used to use at the paper mills and it’s basically two big rolls that are have really tight tolerances the one roll is going a lot faster than the other roll and they’re therefore it has to go through there and kind of rip it apart create friction have a 250 horse motor on the the fast roll and 125 hor motor on the Slow Roll okay so they’re two different two different have a water chilled it gets really hot in there because of the friction so we water chill the rolls inside and we have an infrared temperature in there that checks the temperature surface temperature of the rolls and it adjusts a water valve according there’s an analog ball valve water analog ball valve for the water that adjusts how much water we want how cool or okay that’s what that big white radiator thing is back there correct I think it’s an important thing to point out for jar and

the relationship with Leon and inch is I bet you can remember adding a lot of these features like oh we need to cool that or there’s no way that’s getting way too hot and then you send it down the road what six minute drive over to lavon’s place and he runs it for the weekend or whatnot or maybe you drive down there and install it that’s we always install his equipment right on the you guys are essentially building the car and testing every single feature of it all right there in the same town and then it’s nice make it better every year it’s but what I was getting at is I think you could probably remember a lot of these stages when we doing you talk about I was like oh I remember that they used to catch on fire all the time or this or that right that’s that’s pretty cool I pretty much remember every step and the first phase was of course the pre the shredders and the TG and I basically was there from day one and Lon had me stand up there hours on end to see what was

happening to make adjustments and that’s how it involved of where we’re at I love it another fun fact about Merlin he did all of the wiring the design the install this current machine as well as basically launching joar so I told you we wanted to run with the magician and seems like you keep proving it true we’re at the next section we got this big blue table Marlin can you tell us a little a little bit about it this here is a piece we buy in from Rotex it’s called an apex screener okay and it is a really quick change screen literally in 10 to 15 minutes you can change the screens is it down yep go down and out just slides out like that wow this is pretty cool so that’s what uh what are the balls for the balls will bounce around they go bounce around and then they’ll unclog the holes the holes get clogged and the balls will bounce up and unclog them that is really something really something all right Merlin you want to tell us a little bit about this piece here yes so the last piece you

seen was a Rotex screener that was purchased these two are Forest bird Beast Stoners which we use also for fiber collection and yes they actually painted it red just for us so that was very nice of them and there’s a little Shaker screen in there the stones go through the bottom and the air goes up through the top it lifts the rubber up and the stones come out the top not the bottom the good rubber comes out this way and the Fiber goes up through the air system very unique piece of equipment so these two pieces we just talked about are the only purchased items and the whole plant here so you don’t build everything not quite and you couldn’t get those guys to paint that one blue red I haven’t tried I see it says magnet up there what’s what’s that all about we purchased that drum magnet okay so everything passes by that magnitude get the last little bit of steel wire was busting you on the fact that you bought that he was just saying yeah we above the crack there’s a magnet but you see a whole bunch of these

little drum magnets kind of all over the place so the drum magnet is a round piece that’s always spinning and then there’s a magnet inside we can adjust and it sticks to this drum and the waers bring the wire out the back and the we drops out the back so constantly clean itself correct really that’s basically how we get all your wire out of your system is with drum magnet that’s super impressive let’s head on up to the last piece there’s a lot of Technology going on here just to get stuff into a bag can you explain a little bit of that to us more yes so you have augers we got three Baggers in a row so we have an augur coming up to the scalper augers tend to ball up your fiber in the little balls what your customer does not like to see so the balls will bounce across the top of the holes and get sucked out into the into the cyclone and then below that we have a surge bin where we can also fill so a bagger guy doesn’t have to stand there 24 hours a day he

can fill a bag and then you know wait till the bend is after or cold to change your bag or whatever you needs to do because it has three Baggers to maintain so we have three Baggers but we can essentially have six bags before we have to change anything and it’ll shut down essentially correct so so that’s really cool because I mean we do uh across the street we do catalytic converters it’s all manual but if we want to change a bag got to sweep it out stop what you’re doing take the bag off because we don’t have a second surge bin so that’s uh that’s super cool the technology you guys have here so very efficient and then uh looks like we can change these screens so uh if customer has a different size correct every you have three different sizes so you’re going to have three different screens I really appreciate you coming and walking around with this Merlin I know it’s not easy to get behind a couple cameras and and talk about what you’ve built here but we do appreciate you and your brothers and basically all them you say

85 men and women over there there keeping it going and uh it’s a great piece of equipment we can’t wait to break it in yeah we appreciate you guys too and you’ve been one of you’ve been the best group that we’ve ever worked for so you don’t say that to every customer do you no we don’t okay oh wow love yeah that’s a lot thanks for saying that thank you