Thread: On floor duct for combination machine?

I lived with across the floor ducting for 5 years and swore never again.

You should go above anyway if you are going to tackle your blade guard.

Only thing that beats above is going under the floor - one of THE best things I did in my shed reno.

Hi Ian

is there anyway you can do overhead ducting? I had 150mm pvc on the floor with 2 x 100mm PVC branching out from it. I will never go back to on floor ducting. The box you have envisaged will be an obstacle. I have never tripped over the ducting and I had it for 4-5 years on the floor. It was a night mate.

As unappealing as it sounds I would cut the floor and make a cement trough to the machine big enough to easily contain the ducting and the power cable to the machine. Might as well get that tripping hazard to while you're at it. Steel checker / tread plate on top to cover and allow access to make changes or clear clogs.

If you don't want to dig up the floor here is an online calculator that will give you duct losses for any combination and shapes you're contemplating.
http://www.freecalc.com/ductloss.htm

Pete

I'm wondering about cutting the cement also and cementing over the pipe leaving the 2 ends exposed. That way if you leave the shed you can cut the pvc just under the floor and cement over the 2 ends leaving a flat floor again.

Thanks everyone for the helpful comments. Its clear from the calculator that the Pete mentions that it wouldn't work and I take Bob and Albert's point about the tripping hazzard, certainly a 150 mm round duct on the floor would be bad news.

Underfloor in the way that johnredl suggests might well be practical, it only 800mm. To do this I would have to be absolutely confident that everything is in the right place and that the work that I did during the winter to improve the drainage around that shed is working. The shed is built on a cut into a slope which means that it is down on the clay. It has a membrane under the floor but despite this the floor used to be very damp. I seem to have fixed this with a lot of subsoil drains but I am reluctant to cut the membrane until I have been through another Winter.

At this point I think that I will go to overhead, if this works out then fine, if not I will think again.

I made up the basic structure for the outlet/ muffler today. This now gets a couple of layers of chicken wire over the rods, then 75mm of padding and an outer skin of 18mm ply. The fan outlet is 200 x 200mm and this is 240 x 240mm. Its mostly made from old ducting that came out of an Almond cracker.



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Regards

Ian

I'm watching this thread with interest as I have to connect my combo machine (saw, moulder, planer, thicknesser) to my cyclone. Not sure about too much, other than I won't be cutting a 150mm slot through my concrete floor for below floor ducting.

Dear all

No progress with the ducting but the muffler is taking shape.

This with rust killer, then paint and chicken wire over the inner rods to form the core of the muffler. I have also added the ends of the outer skin made up of two L shaped pieces of plywood. Also on is the galv outlet that will stick out through the shed wall. This has a sloping floor to run any water out.

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This with 75mm of padding over the chicken wire and three sides of the outer plywood on. The padding is soft woolen padding from a quilt at the centre, over that a blanket made of sewn cotton wadding and over that heavy carpet underlay. This has nicely cleaned up all the spare padding from management's quilt HQ, my shed and my neighbors shed!


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Once the sealer is dry I will clean up the ply wood with a trim bit in a router and make up a hanger for the outer end.

I did some sound readings with an ebay DB gauge and it will be interesting to see the impact of this.

Regards

Ian


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Originally Posted by TheNutter

This with 75mm of padding over the chicken wire and three sides of the outer plywood on. The padding is soft woolen padding from a quilt at the centre, over that a blanket made of sewn cotton wadding and over that heavy carpet underlay. This has nicely cleaned up all the spare padding from management's quilt HQ, my shed and my neighbors shed!

Win - Win - Win I like it

Dear all

I have mounted the muffler and, apart from a bit of flashing to seal around the outlet its completed and so now onto the ducting.

Hard to see but there is a turnbuckle on the rh side which is carrying most of the weight.

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I took some sound readings with a cheap meter from ebay and am very pleased with the result. These were all done with the meter sitting on the joiner tale about 3 m from the cyclone. This is a place where I am likely to be standing while it is running.

The background is around 68db, its a windy location!

The cyclone without ducts or muffler is around 84db

The cyclone without ducts but with the muffler is around 74 db. My understanding that 10db is a 50% reduction in perceived sound. Outside, it blows over our veggie garden, so the sound was about the same at 3m and dropped rapidly.

Just for fun I took some readings on some of the other major sources of noise.

Bruce Springsteen doing his best is around 78db

Circular saw, no cut around 87db

Circular saw, cutting 50mm Meranti 95db

SCMS (250mm Makita), no cut 100db

SCMS cutting 50mm Meranti 102db.

So for practical purposes I think that I need to continue to wear ear protection when using the machines but can take it off if I am just letting the extractor run on to clear the air after I have been doing something. I think that this is an outcome that I can live with.

Regards

Ian

Hi all

Its way too hot to do anything this afternoon so time for an update.

Most of what I have done is probably fairly standard so I will focus on what is less common, in particular the combination machine. I couldn't find any information about dust extraction on these machines so I will put in a fair amount of detail in the hope that it will be helpful to others.


I have made up the transition to join to the cyclone and installed all of the ducting. There are two mainlines, one overhead for the Robland Combination and one that goes to the lathe, down the side of the bandsaw under the scms bench and on to the router table.


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I have tried to keep the gates up high and in this picture you can see the high-tech handle for the Robland gate. On the bed of the lathe is the Ikea bell-mouth which will become the fitting for the lathe.

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My idea has always been to bring a duct in under the SCMS enclosure, the only way that I could practically think to do this was to make up a 'sump' out of plastic pipe and ply.

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This fits in the floor of the scms enclosure. There was no way of getting a gate into this line so to block it when I am using the router table (further down the line) I will make up a cover that fits over the hole. Experiments with a bit of ply indicate that this will work.


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The greatest challenge has been the Robland, I could see no easy way of doing this and it hasn't proved to be easy. I decided to bring the duct down over the morticer and make up a plug and play setup with flexible ducting. I have got this to work after a lot of fiddling.

Originally the machine had a single 75mm connection point under the saw on the opposite side to where I wanted it, this connected to an angled plate which sat under the front of the saw blade, this plate had to go as, with a duct on the other side, it was going to foul up the airflow inside the cabinet.

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Getting this out meant partially disassembling the machine and taking the top off. The plate is in the bottom LH corner. I then made up a partial plywood floor and installed a new duct point on the other side of the machine. The floor has a large hole around the spindle moulder motor so there is plenty of airflow.


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In this picture you can see the new saw dust point connected to the duct with a flex line. The blade guard is connected with a 75mm flexi that come off the main line via a dedicated gate. Also visible is the new thicknesser line in its out of use position.

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This old (1983) machine had no dust duct for the planer/thicknesser, just a pivoting safety guard.
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This lent itself to modification to make a thicknesser hood (the extra steel came from the plate that I removed from under the saw) when in use the centerline of the hole lines up with the center of the cutter block with about 25mm of clearance.


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This is the thicknesser hood in place and connected to the duct. The hinges for this hood are in the wrong place to work as an extraction point when planing and rather than modify it I made up a separate fitting to use when planing. It is sitting on the saw table is this picture.

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In use it blocks one end of the thicknesser tunnel. It is located where it gets hit by the chips as they come off the blade. One edge clips in and the other is held by a single bolt. It is easily removed to allow thicknessing.

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I don't have the spindle fence but it would be easy to link this to the hanging duct. I will make up a small hood, probably nothing more than a bit of pipe and a 45deg elbow to work with the morticer.

My aim was to make something that did the best possible job of collecting the dust and the chips which also maintained all of the functionality of the machine, including that of the the guards. To achieve this it had to not get in the way and not add materially to the change over times between the functions. Thus far it seems to be working well but time will tell.


Regards

Ian

Ian,

You certainly have done a lot of work on your dust extraction system. Well done. I'll bet you notice a big difference.

My remaining issue is the combo thicknesser/jointer, which still has a single 4" port. I could upgrade this to 6", but this won't work on my machine because I can't get enough air into and through the machine ... frustrating! In fact, on the plastic hood half of the 4" port is blocked off, so airflow sucks. The only thing that saves me is the directional nature of the chips/dust.

Did you need to do anything to get more air into and through the machine? Any tips on how I might fix my issue would be gratefully accepted.

Thanks John!

At this point I should acknowledge all the value that I have from Bill P, Bob L and this community. I can't imagine how I would have got to this point without people's willingness to share information.

I am certainly pleased with the results of the small amount of use of the system so far. I have been looking at the three hose bandsaw instalation that you and others shared and that is the next thing on my agenda!

For the combination planer/thicknesser does it have one of those flip over hoods? My impression is that those hoods try to do too much and don't end up being really good at anything. If so might the situation be helped by modifying it to become just an effective thicknesser hood by means of some judicious cutting to let air in and then making up a dedicated planer fitting? The one that I made was about the simplest and quickest part of the whole job. By mostly blocking one end of the thicknesser tunnel it draws the whole airflow across the flow of material off the blades and seems to be really effective.

Regards

Ian

Ian,

You and I both ... and many others ... have good reason to thank BobL, Ian and quite a few others for all the help provided. Like you, I would never have achieved the current set-up or produced some of the nice pieces that have exited the shop without their help.

The problem with my combo jointer/thicknesser is that the gap in the table through which the air must pass is quite small. All the air and chips must pass through a small gap in the table, and the size of this gap is such that a vacuum cleaner hooked up to the port and sealed with tape does almost as good a job as a 4" line. It is abysmal. I'l like 10 minutes with the dunce who designed it.

I have a spare flip over hood that I bought to convert to a more functional design. However, whilst I can fix things so I can pull plenty of air, the additional air will not flow where I want it to. I'd open up the holes in the table, but the internals are in the way and it would not help much.

I'd actually consider a new machine if I could find one with good design for dust extraction ... what do you think of my chances?

Hi John

I don't know what is around but I suspect that dust extraction runs a long way last...

Is it the hood that is making the airflow so poor? Any chance of a couple of photos?

Regards

Ian