Shop Talk: The Hammermills.com Blog

Welcome to Shop Talk

Crush, grind, pulverize, shred... Size reduction is fascinating!

Welcome to Shop Talk, the official blog of Schutte-Buffalo Hammermill, LLC. We are a Buffalo, NY based manufacturer of custom engineered size reduction equipment, and we aim to become your trusted resource on its design, manufacture and usage. But first, a little background...

Schutte-Buffawho?

Yeah. It is a mouthful. Frequently misspelled and often mispronounced, but our verbose trade name has an interesting origin.

Back in the late 1920s two size reduction equipment manufacturing companies emerged in Buffalo, NY; each with their own distinct focus.

Schutte (pronounced shoot-ee) Pulverizer Company focused on processing organic materials, building an extensive line of gravity and pneumatic discharge hammer mills, earning them a leadership role in the fields of wood waste reduction and feed and grain processing.  Across town, Buffalo Hammermill Corporation was applying similar principles to more industrial applications such as mining, metals recycling and dry chemical processing.

Fast forward to 2001 and the two companies have merged. The result was Schutte-Buffalo Hammermill, but bigger changes were still ahead. In 2004, company President Tom Warne and General Manager Jim Guarino joined forces to purchase the company from retiring owner, Harry D. Schutte.

Small but Mighty

Post merger and now post acquisition, the new incarnation of Schutte-Buffalo Hammermill is still a company small in size, but one with an ever growing impact.  Even today the staff numbers just under 30, and 90% of the equipment fabrication takes place in "The Shop" adjacent to our corporate headquarters here in Buffalo.  However, we have seen tremendous growth in recent years.  Presently, our installations number more than 16,000 worldwide, serving a wider variety of industries and applications than any other size reduction machinery manufacturer.

Continued Innovation

A key component in this growth and the overriding theme of the Warne / Guarino era has been innovation. Building on the success of Schutte-Pulverizer Co. and Buffalo Hammermill Corp, the time proven principles of size reduction technology and manufacturing have been applied to new and burgeoning applications.

Industrial hammer mill technology originally used to process coal and bulk chemicals has been adapted to de-manufacturing electronics for recycling, and for dismantling spent military munitions.  Similarly, machinery developed for processing wood for mulch production or animal bedding has been applied to processing wood for a myriad of bio-fuel applications.

Just to name a few...

Stay Tuned

Size reduction is amazing! And the application possibilities are virtually endless. In future posts we will share our knowledge about the principles of size reduction and our experiences in greater detail. Some of the general topics will include:

• The basic principles of size reduction

• An in-depth look at different hammer mill components and their functions

• Applications: from the commonplace to the very, um.. unique materials processed in hammer mills.

• A comparison of the different types of size reduction equipment and their uses.

And much more!