Packed crud and grease or remains of a fibre washer round shredder drive shaft

[Min]

Thanks to good advice the shredder hopper is mended and reassembled

But while I've got the business end of the shredder open, thought I'd inspect the drive shaft.

There's a recess round the drive shaft that is partly filled with something. Can't work out if it was a fibre washer, or grease that's got packed with crud.

I have zero experience of these things, so don't even know if you'd get a washer here.

Should I just dig the stuff out and replace with general purpose grease?

Here's a pics of the recess and some of the crud that I've crumbled up.

Thanks folks

 

[Burnerman]

From what I can see, there are some aluminium shards from the slab cutter shaving it's end plate - that's normal enough - and a perfectly good grease seal so I don't think there's a problem there.
Exploded diagrams are available at diyspareparts.com which could help!
John

 

[Min]

Thank you John.

All re-greased and reassembled, and blow me - it works. And diynot.com rocks as a community of experts that's saved me from having to trash this much-loved shredder.

 

[Burnerman]

Pleased you have the machine sorted! I have the Atco equivalent machine which works very well, chewing anything that I can feed through the letterbox. Everything that is, until some chump fed it some barbed wire
John

 

[Min]

Ooops! I thought 'wonder what will happen if I feed in this stump that is about as big as the letter box will take, with this stub sticking out'.
Still, could be worse - a tree surgeon friend fed his Silky into their industrial chipper