Pucking is the process of compressing dry or wet chips, via hydraulic pressure, into a disk for further processing. Pucking greatly reduces volume and optimizes in-house remelt.

Why Dry Puck?

Many machining manufacturers gain a competitive advantage by melting their chips in-house, instead of sending them to a secondary smelter for conversion. The savings are substantial, and include:

No transport costs
Minimized handling costs
Paying to melt the metal only once—when ready for use—instead of at the Secondary smelter, and then again upon return

In-house conversion also offers intangible but very real advantages, including:

Complete control over the valued commodity of chips—you know what you have and where it is
Reduction in environmental liability—you know how your chips are being stored and handled
Accountability of chip quantities—the smelter's "amount received" may not always match the amount sent.

So, while the advantages of in-house conversion are many, there are concerns. A primary one is safety.

The safety hazard arises as the majority of furnaces used for in-house conversion are best suited to remelting solids. Remelting anything else, like chips, inherently leads to excess metal loss. And, in a failed and unsafe effort to eliminate the inherent metal loss, some manufacturers first manufacture a "near solid," by pucking less-than-dry chips.

"Wet pucking" compression removes some–but not all–fluids. The safety hazard lies with the explosion potential of the inherently trapped moisture.

Beyond the safety hazard are other complications from melting moisture-containing pucks. There's inefficiency – due to the need to burn-off fluids. And, these fluids could (and should) have been reclaimed for fluid savings and environmental responsibility. And because they go into the furnace, their combustion results in additional emissions to monitor, capture and process. Handling leaky pucks also inherently introduces safety, housekeeping and environmental liability issues.

It was those very concerns that led Inter-Source to engineer the dry pucker. Receiving dry, consistently sized chips from the Inter-Source wringer, the pucker turns those chips into near-solids, optimized for remelt. The dry pucks also provide handling and transport savings, because of the significant volume reductions when compared to chips. Depending upon chip configuration, dry pucking also yields transportation savings. Other advantages include decreased fuel expended during remelt, increased metal reclamation, and elimination of the many hazards of handling wet chips and pucks.