Simone Giertz Builds a Paper Shredder That Looks Like a Brain
"I made a shredder that looks like a brain because it kind of made sense anatomically?"
We come up with a lot of ideas as makers, and they aren’t always good. Sometimes you won’t realize your idea is bad until you’ve already started working on it, but a lot of the time you catch the bad idea early and it never leaves your notebook. Simone Giertz is a maker with more than two million subscribers, but even she has a notebook full of ideas that didn’t quite make the cut. In her most recent video, Giertz talks about some of those ideas that never came to fruition. She also makes one of those ideas: a paper shredder that looks like a brain.
Giertz first thought up this idea when she was going through brain surgery — a journey that she was very open about. But the brain-shaped paper shredder idea never left her notebook until recently. She was cleaning up her shop, and uncovered a broken paper shredder. That was basically fate telling her that she should go ahead and complete the project. She started by disassembling the old paper shredder in order to remove the motor and shredder blades. Those were cleaned of the old scraps of paper that were jamming up the mechanism.
She then relocated the motor with a custom-fabricated mount to make it sit below the shredder. A stand was welded together from simple steel tube, and that was hidden within a base salvaged from an old desk fan. After wiring up the motor and verifying that it worked, Giertz started working on the brain. Using the brain scans from her own surgery, she modeled a series of 2D sections of her brain. She cut those out of wood on a laser cutter first to ensure that they fit, and then had the final sections cut out of metal with a water jet. Sheets of paper can be inserted into the shredder between the two halves of the brain. It is, of course, more of an art project than anything else, but it certainly looks good!
