Orca Without Teeth

I received the unit as a Christmas gift in 2002. After testing the operation on twenty or thirty sheets of paper, the shredder sat unused for eighteen months. In November of 2003 my wife became concerned about Identity Theft and she decided that we should shred all those documents which we had so casually tossed into the trash can. Thereafter, the Royal Orca 3500 was put to work. It worked fine for the first few hundred documents. Then the the unit broke.

The motor would race but the cutting blades were not turning. I thought something might have jammed the blades so I disassembled the unit. I found the fault was not jammed blades but a cheap plastic gear in the drive train. The worm gear of the motor spins but the gear train does not move.