PeteFree.comFellowes Personal Home Paper Shredder — Confetti Cut Model OD 1200c — an Unfavorable Review — which Probably Applies to a Whole Bunch of Fellowes Shredders
© 2013 Peter Free
06 June 2013
Over time, this comparatively expensive Fellowes home shredder disintegrated into non-operative junk, under very light use
Which is why I don’t have a picture of it and had to settle from a photo of the owner’s manual that came with it.
Lived up to its Made in China origin
In order to protect American workers, I buy American products, whenever I can track down a USA source. But a few years ago, looking for a home shredder, everything available came from China, including this one.
I could live with its design flaws. But given how little we used it, I was surprised when the plastic it was made of became so brittle, that simply pulling the shredded paper catch drawer out caused the plastic to break into chunks.
More detail — more woes
This Fellowes home shredder was new in roughly 2005. We used it to shred confidential papers during two military moves and hardly ever the rest of the time.
The motor managed to cope with about 4-5 sheets of letter-sized paper at a time. More than that, and it would jam.
Even if we followed our personally imposed 4-sheet rule, the motor would soon overheat and have to cool down for 10 to 20 minutes. This characteristic made working through a 3-inch (7.6 centimeter) tall stack of paper cumbersomely time-consuming.
The shredder’s design was less than ergonomically elegant. The noticeably heavy motor is perched on the top of this unit. That location makes the contraption absurdly top-heavy. When it fell over, it bashed feet.
Second, the plastic housing and the shredded paper receptacle drawer — that’s the part with the oval window that you can see in the above picture — were not quite rigid enough to work properly. The weight of the motor would compress the top edge of the drawer, so that you often had to yank to get it out.
Today, my wife noticed that the red indicator light on top of the unit was on. This light is supposed to indicate a paper jam or an improperly seated shredded paper drawer. But in this case, not having been used for months, there could not have been a jam because it had operated correctly the last time we used it.
While investigating what was wrong, I moved the drawer in an out a few times. As it often did, the drawer eventually caught on the motor housing’s upper lip. I pulled on it to get it back out.
A large triangular piece of plastic broke off.
Assuming that I had pulled too forcibly, I seated my fingers adjacent to the missing piece and pulled more softly. Another triangular piece broke off.
The two removal attempts had tilted the drawer just enough that it was now stuck in place — with the top of drawer partially out and the bottom end too far in.
When I tried to pry the drawer into proper alignment, a third piece broke off at the top of the drawer and the plastic motor casing, which serves as a shell for the drawer to seat into, split in half almost all the way back to the rear of the unit.
The drawer, nevertheless, stayed stubbornly stuck in place.
Disintegrating plastic polymer
I guessed that either:
(a) I had gained superhuman strength (unlikely for a geezer my age)
or
(b) some of the side chains in the plastic polymer(s) that the unit was made from had disintegrated over time.
To test this hypothesis, I decided to see how much force it would take to deliberately break the drawer, which was still stuck in the shredder’s casing.
Simply dropping an 8-pound (3.6 kilogram) sledge hammer from about 10 inches (25 centimeters) above the drawer broke it into large pieces. When I repeated the process on the shredder casing, the same thing happened.
Conclusion
The Chinese plastic used to make this shredder is unstable over time. It appears to become more brittle.
I am assuming that the red stop light came on, when the black plastic that the component parts were made of came out of proper alignment and caused the stop switch to trip.
Not recommended
Many Chinese products (including food and children’s toys) are notorious for low-grade quality and adulterated components.
For example I have repeatedly noticed that Chinese hardware items — like bolts, nuts and washers — are made from soft and easily stripped materials. Whenever I see these holding something together that I have bought, I cringe.
Consequently, it does not surprise me that this contempt for manufacturing quality carried over into the China-made Fellowes shredder.
If we are going to export the American economy abroad, let us at least insist that offshore manufacturing meet mediocrity’s standards.
The only way to enforce this requirement is to punish companies doing business in the United States by not buying their products, when they sell crap like this.
I will not be buying another Fellowes unit.