Thread: woodwool for packaging

I've seen some blokes able to make that stuff come off a wood turning lathe. I've not had much success trying to do it.
Found a you tube clip of how to make it with out spending several K's on a machine. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d9gx7FAkCk
Also found one for Wood Wool Tasmania Wood Wool Tasmania
Hope this helps
Kryn

A chainsaw will make a similar type of material when applied to the wood with the grain running parallel to the bar.
On a big saw, with a long bar and a bigger chain, you can make it so fast that it can jam the chain around the sprocket area.
The long strings of wood are called noodles or wood spaghetti.

If it were me I'd rather use the time and material to make something I could sell rather than shredding it for packing. Koch and Co which are almost next door to Carbatec Sydney sell the stuff for about $60 a 10kg bale plus GST, and 10kg goes a long way.

As a natural alternative you could use millet straw, I can buy that from local farmers in my area for about $10 a bale and at that price I wouldn't bother trying to make something. Shouldn't be too hard to get around Canberra, I believe the broom factory at Tumut still uses millet straw grown locally.

It would be a good way to get rid of unwanted off cuts.

Chop a length off a wide Pine board and stick it through a thicknesser sideways so the straight knives are cutting across the grain. The wider your board the longer your cut will be . I had joined bits up and discovered this by accident just needing to thickness an off cut one day. Doing this would block my dust extractor straight away, I had to take it out by hand. It gives the springy long thin shavings that will work for what you want. I was surprised at how well it would do for stuffing a pillow when I first saw it.
Rob

Originally Posted by woodPixel

Does anyone know how to efficiently make wood wool?

woodwool.jpg

Spill plane; not sure about the efficiently requirement.


Graeme

I saw and enquired about the 10kg bag of it. Its pretty big at 46cm x 36cm x46cm

It isn't that I don't want/need 10kg of it for $50, its more that I'd prefer to make it myself for some of the small things I make and wish to put them on Etsy.

They get really bubbly and excited over that kind of idiocy. Wrap something in recycled cardboard, with brown paper and pretty plant based ribbon, and some wood fluff and they go mental over it. Its complete frippery and a total waste of resources, but the "hipster" and "organic" movements have collectively lost their minds and have a new set of arbitrary acceptabilities. I need to over-pack to be... economical...

A 10kg bag would certainly do the job, but its probably made with slave labour and illegally harvested forests just to make wool. Its like the whole obscenity of Tasmania and woodchipping.

That video with the bandsaw method looks like a fairly scary thing!

What I was hoping for was maybe a toothed plane to use on a hunk of straight grained pine. I might dremel up one of my old crappy Stanley plane blades! Make it like one of those toothed roughing planes that seems so popular, but far more aggressive.

Lets see how it goes.

Originally Posted by woodPixel

.....They get really bubbly and excited over that kind of idiocy. Wrap something in recycled cardboard, with brown paper and pretty plant based ribbon, and some wood fluff and they go mental over it. Its complete frippery and a total waste of resources, but the "hipster" and "organic" movements have collectively lost their minds and have a new set of arbitrary acceptabilities. I need to over-pack to be... economical...
......

Especially if the wood fluff is home made from treated pine.

Originally Posted by auscab

Chop a length off a wide Pine board and stick it through a thicknesser sideways so the straight knives are cutting across the grain. The wider your board the longer your cut will be . I had joined bits up and discovered this by accident just needing to thickness an off cut one day. Doing this would block my dust extractor straight away, I had to take it out by hand. It gives the springy long thin shavings that will work for what you want. I was surprised at how well it would do for stuffing a pillow when I first saw it.
Rob

I hope the OP doesn't have a spiral head thicknesser. If he does, he will be a bit disappointed with this method!

Actually, it is a great suggestion, and should work pretty well. An alternative might be raffia, or the stuff they make sea grass matting from.

Alan...

If purchasing wasn't an option definitely recommend using a spiral head.

My jointer makes decently sized shavings that could be used for that purpose. Probably stick a grid or similar on the dust port to extract the fines out of it

Yes, I know what you mean about them going gaga over silly packaging. The wood wool Koch sell comes from NZ so it's not from illegal logging or slave labour, but it's not enviro friendly considering the shipping from there to here. Maybe you are overthinking it - they may go just as gaga over ordinary curly wood shavings used as packing, and you only need a hand plane to make them. If you clamp several narrow strips together in a vise it wouldn't take long to produce a small pile of thin curly shavings.

My thoughts too!

Remember that you are most likely paying 250kg per M3 for your freight to pretty much anywhere. Apply that to your $ rate per kilo.

Often an interesting exercise.

Cheers

I like to make complex solutions to simple problems so here's my bid:

Make a plane blade with equal notches, just like a tilers notched adhesive spreader. Fit a fence to the side of the plane; similar to a jointer fence and set so the first "cutter" on the iron is the same distance from the fence as one of the notch widths. Then plane away until the notches bottom out and you can't cut any deeper; so now you have a pile of wood wool and a piece of timber with grooves/veins/reeds/flutes. Then swap to a second plane with a normal iron and plane away on the timber to bring down those reeds/grooves/whatever until a full width shaving appears. Swap planes again; repeat until sufficient wool has been formed. If you get both planes cutting the same depth you can alternate equal numbers of strokes; 10 strokes notched iron, 10 strokes plain iron, 10 notched, 10 plain.

Hmm; maybe not complex enough. Perhaps have a fence on both sides of the plane but one of them hard up to the iron, so now you take one shaving to the left fence, then one shaving to the right fence; left, right; links, rechts; sinister, dexter...

I now envisage a previously unthought of use for an Aldi wooden plane...! All joking aside; $15 for the Aldi plane, some timber scraps and a few screws will do it. Add about 10-15 minutes with a mini cut-off wheel or thin grinding wheel in the dremel and you're ready to wool up.