Ten years ago I did a lot of looking at designs for cyclones,but never built one. But recently wanted to make a dust collecter for a sand blaster in the shop that I do little things for.
Anyway found that one can buy the cyclone bit on AliExpress or Ebay in a bunch of sizes. One suitable for use with a shop vac runs about $18. Took a long time to get here, but works well. Made of plastic so will not last forever, but still worth while.
On 11/21/2019 5:13 PM, snipped-for-privacy@krl.org wrote: > Ten years ago I did a lot of looking at designs for cyclones,but never built one. But recently wanted to make a dust collecter for a sand blaster in the shop that I do little things for. >
Mind posting a link. I recently unplugged the heavy duty hose on my shop vac and started using it to clean up the bulk of the chips in the mills again. I'd love to have the most of them drop right into a trash barrel. Maybe if most moisture dropped out there too I could put a filter back in the vac.
Been thinking about making Thein seperator, but... well... time.
...>> Been thinking about making Thein seperator, but... well... time.
I always filter by "Orders" because often the lowest price is a store that has not a single sale of this product, or has a visibly inferior version that people don't choose, or some other reason to avoid them.
Always cut off the URL at the ? for AliExpress.
Here are a couple of links, slightly different products:
On 11/22/2019 6:53 PM, Clifford Heath wrote: > On 23/11/19 12:23 pm, snipped-for-privacy@krl.org wrote: >> On Friday, November 22, 2019 at 4:31:40 PM UTC-5, Bob La Londe wrote: >>> On 11/21/2019 5:13 PM, snipped-for-privacy@krl.org wrote: >>> > Anyway found that one can buy the cyclone bit on AliExpress or Ebay >>> Mind posting a link. I recently unplugged the heavy duty hose on my > ...>> Been thinking about making Thein seperator, but... well... time. >>
Found a few on Fleabay with "US STOCK" for a few dollars more and free shipping. I went ahead and ordered two different ones to play with. If I can use something like a 45 gallon Brute trash can or even a 55 gallon barrel that would be great. If they don't work that well they still didn't cost much.
You have probably already had a look on youtube but if not there are a bunch of construction videos on how to put together a dust collector with various shop vacs or bigger blowers, with homemade cyclones or the commercial ones. If you want a small, portable unit you could adapt this one:
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or the one he based his on:
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They used 5 gallon buckets to hold the dust/wood shavings, not 45 gallon, but I think they are pretty clever and simple to build so you might get a useful idea or two.
I had planned on building a thein separator for a barrel for a long time. I even started once, but I'm just so darn busy in the shop these days I never seem to get back to it. If the $20 (+/-) import cyclones can be mounted on a barrel lid or improvised barrel lid and work for half a year before the chips eat them up I'd be good with that.
Five gallon bucket. HA. One day on the Tormach or the Hurco doing even moderately heavy material removal can fill a five gallon bucket. Sometimes nearly two. I have had to stop mid day a few times just to clean out the machines so the coolant will flow back to the tank. LOL.
It was always fun to see our head machinist climbing into a 60x30 Fadal with a snow shovel and standing on the table so he could fill up a couple of 45 gallon garbage cans with white snow - the chips and strings of white acetal from a recurring job we did that ran for a couple of days every few months.
I think you have discussed how small your shop is, so I was thinking you could stack the shop vac and the cyclone collection barrel to save room, just reverse the youtube example and put the barrel at the bottom, sitting on a base with casters for mobility, then use legs from that base to a shelf to hold the shop vac above the cyclone mounted on the barrel lid. Use 2" PVC pipe for the legs, screw down four caps to the top of the base and the bottom of the shelf as in the video so the legs stay attached to the bottom of the shelf and pull out of the base for easy disassembly, then make a pocket with walls or some pegs for the shop vac to sit down into on top of the shelf so it lifts out easily but can't roll off. To empty lift off shop vac then the shelf with legs, roll barrel to dumpster or recycling container and empty. Anyway, just some ideas for you.
A funny thing about cyclones is the separation efficiency is dependent on the velocity of the fluid and the diameter. They don't scale. Bigger isn't better. I was surprised as a young researcher in Magnesium to see the Dorr hydroclones. We processed about 80,000 gpm seawater with about 1200 ppm Mg, the mag hydrate was initially settled in ponds with huge rakes, then the slurry was pumped from the center of the ponds to the hydroclone house where hundreds of very small cyclones were manifolded together. The further concentrated mag hydrate came off the bottom, clears from the center. Each cyclone wasn't over 2-3" in diameter. Mag hydrate is a very tiny particle, so it took a lot of force to separate it from the seawater.
Of course aluminum chips in air are going to come out orders of magnitude easier, so it probably won't be an issue at any size you can use. You've handled a 45 gal can half full of Al swarf? Not too heavy? Anyway, hope it works well.
On 11/25/2019 5:08 AM, Pete Keillor wrote: > Of course aluminum chips in air are going to come out orders of > magnitude easier, so it probably won't be an issue at any size you can > use. You've handled a 45 gal can half full of Al swarf? Not too > heavy? Anyway, hope it works well. >
Half full (no liquid) I can just barely lift it to the dumpster. 3/4 full and I use the tractor and fish the barrel out afterwards. >
Just curious, do you recycle your aluminum swarf? Here outside Baltimore there are a few scrap companies that buy machine shop waste. The one we used gave us a couple of laundry baskets (or maybe mail carts), carts with canvas bags maybe 3'x5' and 3' deep, and we would call when one was full. They would come with a box truck with a crane and scale, weigh them as they loaded them, then pay us for our aluminum and stainless steel and drop off empty carts for next time. If we had chunks or saw cutoffs or other nonferrous metals we kept that separate and got a better price for them. They also paid for soda cans so we crushed and saved those, too. I don't know the current pricing but 5-10 years ago a cart of aluminum lathe and mill chips was over $200, maybe over $300. Basically free money since we had to dump the chips somewhere after cleaning out a machine anyway, and the carts were closer than the dumpster :-).
I have not been. Last time I checked the price for chips was so much lower than cans that it wasn't worth it, and I had to haul. Also if there was any hint of coolant residue they would discount it further. As far as I know there is nobody local who will pickup. This is not a large industrial area. There is very little industry here except for Barco Metal Stamping and a few others in primarily military or agriculture and the R&D side the military mostly comes from elsewhere. My niche is a world wide market so it doesn't matter where I am located except for supply convenience, and I can get most anything delivered.
My shop is actually not all that small. Compared to the shop my BIL managed before he retired its tiny, but my limitations are more organization and electrical service than actual space. My main machine room is 14 x 24. There are 4 CNC mills a small lathe, and an assembly bench in that room, but my shop overall is 50x60 (ft). My bigger CNC mill and my bigger lathe are not inside the machine room. However stacking is a perfectly valid option. It seems floor space is always at a premium. Even extra buckets of way oil and soluble coolant find themselves getting moved from spot to spot depending on today's projects.
My big suck limitation is the 100 amp sub panel feeding my shop. I don't weld when the machines are running. I've got a new ACDC Variable Frequency Pulse TIG machine that I haven't even done more than plug it in and make it buzz once because I don't want to run it and risk crashing a job when the CNC mills are running.
When I built my shop running a machine shop with multiple automated CNC machines running at the same time wasn't even a glimmer of an idea. It was just supposed to be a warehouse for my contracting business and a place I could run a few power tools one at a time. A 100 amp sub seemed like overkill at the time. Mostly just so I could run a welder without killing the office (16x24) air conditioner. LOL.
LOL. Yeah right. From Chinese import cyclones at the low end of the manufacturing spectrum and low end of the price range. I think atleast for now its just a disposable tool. Like end mills only cheaper.
Nah. I freed up 6 240v breaker slots when I moved to the HVAC unit from baseboard electrocution heaters. (net 4 after adding the singe breaker and double for the compressor). That let me have 3 doubles for 240v outlets in my 2-car shop.
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