Thread: Adding a vortex baffle

I must admit my dust collection practices are somewhat ad hoc. I have more of a garbage collection approach rather than a dust minimization issue. My old dusty and garage vac leak terribly, but since this is a hobby run out of an over crowded garage with no option to move the dust collectors outside I make sure the flow through ventilation is as good as possible and I use a dust mask whenever any of the machinery is running.

My old dust extractor died a few weeks ago and I've acquired a slightly damaged 2nd hand Carbatec one to replace it. Originally I was intending to just take the motor off the CT and use it to replace the burnt out one on the old King of UFO, but this proved problematic because of the motor dimensions and variation in spindle size. So I have moved the pleated filter and the good plastics off the old dusty and installed them on the CT.

I have been using an external Thien baffle chip separator on the old system for many years and have always appreciated the ease of emptying the trash it afforded.
thien.jpg

While I was reassembling the CT, and having read a lot now of how a pre separator reduces extractor efficiency, it occurred to me that perhaps I should bite the bullet and remove it and put up with emptying the plastic bags.

Only the finest dust used to go through to the extractor before and it would always swirl in the bags and get sucked back up into the filter so every time before I turned it on I used to rotate the paddles and watch the heavy amounts of dust fall back into the bag, much more than I had collected in the last session. The old collector also had a ramped path through the separator, while the CT has a dished funnel.

kufo.jpg

As I was looking at the CT separator ring during reassembly I remembered people playing around with woks and other things to improve separation in the bags and I decided to try and add a Thien baffle to the machine to see what happens.

baffle.jpgbaffle2.jpg

I don't have any way to make empirical measurements to know whether or not it makes a difference, but it should be easy to see whether the baffle clogs up or if it reduces the amount of dust sucked back into the pleated filter every operation.

It is however immediately obvious that removing the intermediate chip separator has greatly improved suckability.