The web opener STO (shark tooth opener) or „picker“ is a very strong opening machine.  The heavy frame supports 4 feed rolls and the heavy opening roll with  forged steel teeth. In the old design the opener roll was opening the material by pulling it downwards from the feed rolls. This caused, with some material, thee lower feed roll to wrap. Once wrapped, the feed roll could not hold back the material and the opening was no good. It was very difficult to free the lower feed roll as there was no good access.

We therefore redesigned the process so the opening roll pulls the material upwards so the upper roll would wrap.

The upper roll is easily accessible, to our surprise no more wrapping happened with the new design.

Another problem with the old design was the drive system. The old design used a chain drive for the 4 feed rolls and as the diameters of the feed rolls is small, also the sprockets were small. This caused jumping of the chain, wear and often maintenance.

The new design uses cardan links to transfer the power from big toothed belt driven wheels to the small area of the feed rollers.

This drive needs very little maintenance and can effortlessly drive the small feed rolls that also can move up and down.Disc brake for fast stop of the main cylinder.By this, a strong recycling machine was made up to date and problems that have been there for decades, were eliminated.