Thread: Experimenting with a Toolex 2HP dust extractor

My little barrel vacuum cleaner was having no apparent effect, trying to suck the dust out of the 100mm port of my new table saw. It was reasonably effective when used with my Triton 2000, but it seemed to be needing an upgrade, to match the step up from the Triton to the 10" beast. With a thousand projects, (not all wood related) clamouring for attention, the idea of constructing my own dust extraction system lost some of its glitz, and I ducked out on a Saturday morning and bought the first thing that I could find, that would probably do the job.

I had done a lot of research in a very short amount of time, by Googling and following through with the information available from Bill Pentz and also J Phil Thien, and that gave me a lot of ideas, but most of them were either going to cost a lot of money, or take a lot of time, and I wanted to turn a lot of big bits of wood into smaller ones, before sticking them together to make a much bigger bit of wood.

Anyway, the dust extractor worked as it was supposed to, but that was not quite what I wanted. First of all, I appreciate that removing the visible sawdust is only a part of what effective dust extraction should be about, but mainly, with the design as it was, everything that was sucked up, had to travel through the impeller before it was deposited into the collection bag, and I would really like to be sucking up things that probably should not be doing that.

I decided that I would make some modifications, and this is what I did.

First of all, I acquired a 120litre plastic bucket, which would be solid enough not to get sucked together when pulling a bit of a vacuum from it. Then I disassembled my collector and swapped the parts around. I built a shroud to cover over the louvred window of my shed, and mounted the outlet of the impeller so that it would blow everything that made it that far outside. I found a 125mm aluminium flexible tube at Masters in the exhaust fan area, and used that to connect to the separator. The original unit, had a cyclone that had all that I needed, ie, a 125mm inlet, and a metal shroud that should direct the incoming air to spiral to create the vortex that would separate out the particles. I wanted to see how it would work, so I bought a sheet of flat clear acrylic from Bunnings, which I used to make a top on the Toolex separator. I fitted a 125mm port in the middle to connect to the power unit. I then created a "Thien baffle" to allow the particles to fall through into the collection bin, and after making a bit of a stand to hold it all together I gave it a try.

It worked really very well, until I managed to choke the input with the old collection bag, that I was using as a source of dust, at which time the air flow was reduced to the point that there was no cyclone any longer.

I hope that I have managed to attach a few photos, in case I have not done a good job of explaining myself.

It seems to do a very good job of getting rid of the visible stuff, including things which would not be good to run through the impeller. I need to see how good a job it does of taking care of the invisible stuff, and I have ordered a dust detecting sensor that I hope to home brew into an indicator to give me an idea of what is left behind. Just in case there is lots of the nasty stuff, still floating about, I have put a bathroom exhaust fan at one end of my shed, and I always work with a roller door open at the other. I intend to find an even bigger fan to install on another window, to increase the air exchange, and just to keep me a little cooler, as it is getting warmer these days. (Could be the approach of summer, could be global warming ???)

I am now going to duct the inlet out to the various machines that I have, and shall continue my experiments to see if it keeps on doing what it should, when I attach a lot of pipe to it.