Kobra 400 C4

The Kobra 400 C4 is the cross-cut member of Kobra's 400 chassis: a floor-standing departmental shredder built around a 16 inch (400 mm) throat, a 53 gallon bin and a 2,100 W motor rated for 24 hour continuous duty. What separates it from the strip-cut 400 S5 sitting on the identical frame is the cutting head — 3.9 x 40 mm particles that place it at DIN 66399 P-4 rather than P-2. If a department shreds personnel files, patient records or financial paperwork all day and needs a defensible security level rather than the cheapest throughput, this is the 400 to buy.

Key Features

• 24 hour continuous duty motor. Kobra rates the 2,100 W drive for uninterrupted running. There is no thermal duty cycle and no timed cool-down, so a shared machine does not stop working halfway through an archive purge.
• Genuine P-4 particle size. 3.9 x 40 mm equals 156 mm², inside the 160 mm² ceiling DIN 66399 sets for P-4. It is a real P-4, not a P-3 head marketed upward.
• 400 mm feed opening. Wide enough for stapled A4, US Letter and Legal fed short-edge first. Staples and paper clips pass through without pre-sorting.
• Handles cards and optical media. Kobra rates the C4 head for credit cards including chip cards, films, CDs, DVDs, Blu-ray, floppy disks and USB pen drives — media goes in the same throat, no separate slot.
• 53 gallon (200 litre) bin on castors. The full-width cabinet rolls out on the machine's own castors, so emptying does not mean lifting a bin over a lip.
• Energy Smart standby. The motor drops into low-power standby shortly after the last sheet clears, which matters on a machine that is switched on all day.

Specifications

What's in the Box

The shredder ships assembled on its cabinet with the pull-out waste bin fitted and a power cord for 115 V service. Waste bags are not included — order 200 litre bags separately, and budget for shredder oil, because a cross-cut head needs periodic oiling and the base 400 C4 has no automatic oiler (the 400 C4 AO variant does).

Who Should Buy This — and Who Should Not

Buy it if you are equipping a department of roughly 10 to 25 people who shred continuously rather than in bursts, and P-4 is the level your retention policy or state privacy statute calls for. The continuous-duty motor is the real argument: office-grade machines rated "10 minutes on, 30 minutes off" fail exactly when a records purge starts.

Look elsewhere if throughput matters more than security level — the Kobra 400 S5 on the same chassis takes 52–54 sheets per pass at 80 g/m² instead of 40–42, at P-2. If your risk assessment calls for P-5, the C4 head cannot get you there; step up to a Kobra P-5 machine such as the AF.1 C2 (lower volume, autofeed) or the 430 TS C2 (much higher volume, conveyor-fed). If people carry full wastebaskets to the shredder rather than handfuls of paper, the Kobra 400 WB adds a bulk hopper on the same cutting head. And if you want unattended shredding, the C4 has no automatic feed tray — the AF.1 line does.