Kobra Cyclone

The Kobra Cyclone does not work like a conventional shredder. Instead of a fixed cutting head it uses a rotary cutting chamber and an interchangeable screen: material circulates until the particles are small enough to fall through the mesh. Change the screen and you change the security level — the standard Cyclone is supplied in the 002, 003 and 004 configurations, corresponding roughly to P-2, P-2/P-3 and P-4, and it can be re-screened later without replacing the machine. It swallows 500 sheets at a time and will also take cardboard, plastic bottles and aluminium cans.

Key Features

• Interchangeable screens set the security level. Screens CX-002 through CX-006 are ordering options, and they can be swapped after purchase. Coarser screens maximise throughput; finer screens raise the security level. One machine covers a range from P-2 up to P-5.
• 500 sheets at a time. The feed opening takes a whole stack rather than a metered pass, because the cutting chamber recirculates material until it is small enough to pass the screen.
• Up to 490 lb (roughly 420 kg) of paper per hour. Kobra also quotes up to 45,000 credit cards, 15,000 optical discs and 7,000 floppy disks per hour on this chassis.
• Shreds materials a document machine cannot. Cardboard, plastic bottles and aluminium cans are on Kobra's material list alongside paper, cards and optical media.
• Integrated dust extraction. The cutting chamber is closed and vented, which is the only practical way to handle granulated paper at this rate without filling the room with dust.
• 6 kW three-phase drive. 8 hp on a 208 V three-phase supply drawing up to 50 A per phase, feeding a 400 litre (100 gallon) waste chamber.

Specifications

What's in the Box

The machine ships with one screen fitted — specify which of CX-002, CX-003, CX-004, CX-005 or CX-006 you require when ordering, because the screen determines the security level you receive. Additional screens are ordered separately and are user-changeable. Waste bags are not included; the chamber takes a 400 litre bag. A 208 V three-phase supply at 50 A per phase must be available and terminated by a qualified electrician.

Who Should Buy This — and Who Should Not

Buy it if your destruction requirement is mixed and industrial: a recycling or waste-management operation, a distribution centre destroying packaging along with paperwork, or a service bureau whose clients specify different security levels. Nothing else in the Kobra range lets you re-screen a single machine from bulk-reduction P-2 up to P-5 as contracts change, and very little will take a plastic bottle or an aluminium can at all.

Do not buy it if you are shredding office documents in an office. It is 85 in deep, 970 lb, needs three-phase power at 50 A per phase and runs at 75–85 dB(A) — hearing protection territory, not open-plan. A department needing P-4 is far better served by the Kobra 400 C4, and a records operation needing high volume at a fixed security level by the conveyor-fed Kobra 430 TS models. If you need P-6 or P-7 rather than a variable level, the Kobra Cyclone HS6 is the high-security build of this same chassis. And if the job is specifically turning boxes into packing material, the Kobra Flexpack does that far more cheaply.