Thread: Clone dusty

It never would have occured to me to have a small suction line to keep the bag tight to the inside of the bin. Does it work really well or sort of well at keeping the bag in place?

Pete

Works really well so far and haven't had any bag sucking through the pipes

I don't wish to put a damper on your setup but one reason why you may not be seeing much fine dust in the DC is that the setup will have a relatively low air flow so it is less likely to capture the fine dust being made at the source of the sawdust. 4" ducting can at best only move 400 cfm of air and adding a cyclone drops the air flow by around 25% so you will be down to ~300 cfm. To collect the fine dust at source around 1000 CFM is needed otherwise it floats off and fills up the shed and eventually settles out. Maybe do a bit of a clean up and then keep an eye on surfaces around your shed in the coming weeks to see what I mean.

G'day Bob
this is just a temp job to see if it worked while I wait for the ducting to arrive to setup my big dusty
The workshop has 2 air filters going and they seem to be doing the job on fine particles I also wear my trend airshield and its filters aren't showing much dust build up.
always interested in your comments and posts
Dennis

Originally Posted by fubar

G'day Bob
this is just a temp job to see if it worked while I wait for the ducting to arrive to setup my big dusty
The workshop has 2 air filters going and they seem to be doing the job on fine particles I also wear my trend airshield and its filters aren't showing much dust build up.
always interested in your comments and posts
Dennis

Hi fubar.
Nice job so far. I hope you keep us updated with your progress on this.
If your aren't already planning to do this, I'd suggest that when setting up with your larger dusty you look at ways of connenting to to the cyclone as efficiently as possible. A 180 degree 'elbow' of flex like in your trial setup will cause a lot of friction and rob a lot of airflow. If you can, the best way would be to have the fan sitting directly above the cyclone.

Thanks for the post Dennis. I've had people so keen to put a vac cyclone to work that they temporarily hook it up with nothing but sticky tape holding it all together, your temporary DE cyclone install is a lot better than that! As BobL says though we need to get that cfm airflow at the machines up as high as possible. I'll certainly be taking a keen interest in your progress with this, might even end up stealing a few of your ideas for my install.

Cheers,
David

Well David I've learnt that sometimes my temporary jobs have to last a little while, when life gets in the way of plans. Plus getting the fan up above the cyclone means the nice spot I had planned to use to house the dusty(an unused shower room) is out of the picture need to come up with a new cunning plan.

Weell this is the next instalment of temporary setups. I picked up some 2ndhand ducting 5" and 6" need to get some joiners now.the frame is some C channel I had laying around tec screwed together

Wow Dennis, that's quite an edifice you've constructed there! How much head height have you got? Doing anything with the DC is obviously a step ladder job. A plus with your design is the minimal floorspace it all takes up. I couldn't do this, I only have about 2400mm head height where I'm putting mine in the shed next door to the work shed.

Once you have your clamps organised I'd be very interested to see the set up you've come up with. Are you intending to mount them vertically on a wall or do you have sufficient space to use them horizontal? Following your progress keenly.

I can see 2 inter-related problems with this setup, if the intention is to maximise air flow and thus collect more fine dust at source.

To start with, the cyclone on the top of the wheelie bin will automatically reduce the air flow through the system by ~20%.

The benefit of using pleated filters is that they can be sort of cleaned bt rattling, without removing them from the DC.
However, this cleaning to be done on a regular basis, i.e. every hour or so of use.
If this is not done they will clog up and further reduce air flow.

The use of an inline cyclone like the one shown filters out the coarse stuff but lets the fine stuff through to the DC. This means there is reduced trapping of the fine dust by the coarse dust in the collection bags so the fine dust floats around more easily in the DC which quickly reduces filter efficiency meaning they should be cleaned even more regularly.
However, after cleaning, with no coarse dust in the bag to help trap the fine dust the fine dust knocked off the insides of the filters, they will be immediately swirled up by the air flow and quickly re-clogg.
To maintain maximum flow rates in a system like this the filters need to be thoroughly cleaned and the collection bags emptied every time the wheelie bin is emptied.
To me this sort of defeats the purpose of using the inline cyclone and the wheelie bin.

With the filters mounted up so high it looks like it would be difficult to clean the filters and empty the bags on a regular basis.

The extractor has the jet vortex cone separators which reduce the amount of fine dust and cleaning of the filters and after using them for a week ripping couple of hundred meters of hardwood they certainly seem to be doing the job. Flat surfaces don't have a buildup of dust and only a small amount came down when I rattled the filters. the next thing to fit will be an electric drive to do the rattling if I keep this setup. But it is a temp setup and I am more than happy to keep changing.

Next mod was to make a new lid as the original was starting to flex and allow dust escape this seems to be working now.

Hi Fubar, any follow up or wisdom from this creation?

I have one of Aldavs cyclones and I'm keen to go. It's sitting in a deliberately inconvenient spot so I'm forced to do something about it

I'm thinking of ripping the DC to bits and mounting the blower directly on top and then the bag system to that - reducing two pipes and minimising height.