Surface grinder dust collection strategies

wheel

grinding,

Equip it with coolant and grind wet, not much dust then and things stay cooler.

AWEM

You look to have a pretty good arrangement and good plan to improve. Just wondering, is your vacuum partly clogged? Pretty easy to do. I cleaned up my grinder vacuum and it went from worse than a shop vac to "suck the ball off the trailer hitch" vac. i found hair, lint, and milling swarf in mine.

'Course you could go wet, and have another whole set of issues.

Karl

As Andrew says and Karl almost says, look into putting some guards around the table and running wet. The only time you need dust extraction is when dressing a wheel really aggressively. The rest of the time, the coolant sweeps the fines up and dumps them in your coolant clarifier. You also get less "sucking up" of the work because it's kept nice and cool.

If you have to stick with running dry, the main thing is to put the hood where the grit is going to be thrown into it already, without any help from the suction. The grit is coming off at 60mph. Anything you do with airflow is only going to help once the grit is already in the pipe. So have a hood that has steep enough angles that the grit won't bounce out and have it located so that it's almost touching the work. Then move the air through the pipes to keep the grit heading towards the cyclone.

Mark Rand(don't have any dust extraction on the surface grinder, just coolant) RTFM

The collector has a near-new set of bags in it. I got it from a mold shop that used it for graphite before moving to a new building where they installed a central collection system. I removed the bags and vacuumed them. There's little difference in the apparent flow with the bags removed, so I'm pretty confident it's working properly. The flow is much greater than a shop vac.

Yeah, despite the advantages of wet grinding, for the limited amount I use the grinder I'd rather see how well I can collect the dust before thinking about dealing with the sticky mist and coolant bugs.

It may come to that, I just hate having to deal with the coolant mess if I can avoid it.

That's what I've tried to do so far, but I underestimated the spread of the rooster tail of dust. I guess I'll make some quick and dirty pickups of PVC and cardboard to see how much improvement I can make.

I have an old Boyer Shultz 612 surface grinder, I've always used it dry, but I'm intrigued by the possibility of running it wet if it won't kill the spindle bearings. Anyone know if this machine can run with water based coolant or grinding oil? I have a Sioux valve grinder and it uses grinding oil, very little if any dust escapes and the parts being ground run cool.

Snip

I have a 6x12 Boyar Schultz with the dust collector base. It came without a "funnel" or hose. I mocked up a collecting funnel out of cardboard, mimicking my recollection of the factory unit. My thinking was that Boyar Schultz had more experience in this area than I did.

The unit works pretty well while grinding. The only noticeable grit "bounce back" comes from dressing.

John Normile

Perhaps temporarily remove your collection nozzle and replace it with a piece of cardboard faced with a sheet of witness paper (plain white paper) suitably mounted to the wheel shroud and perpendicular to the magnetic chuck. If this detects the particle strikes satisfactorily, grind a variety of materials, dress the wheel, etc with it in place. Then shape the intake of a new collection nozzle to encompass the accumulated particle spray pattern that has formed on the witness paper.

David Merrill

I like it. Perhaps some stripes of Vaseline would catch the particles and better show the distribution of the spray.

Hi Ned,

I am an applications engineer and have been working for a variety of dust collector manufacturers for over 15 years. The best way to handle a small surface grinder is to incorporate the splash guard into a box like hood with sides and a roof. The roof would be your pick up hood or suction hood where you would mount a collar to attach a hose that you can run back to your collector. What is the width of the table, this will determine your hose size?

The other method is a magnetic hood that can be attached to your wheel guard, this hood is closer to the source and can be used for dressing the wheel. Sometimes tolerances are critical on machines and the added weight will effect of the hood will effect the part tolerance.

I currently work for a small dust or mist collector manufacturer and we can offer a collector depending on if you are filtering mist or dust or both? The company name is AER Control Systems, visit our products on the web at

If you would like to phone me, I can be reached at 866-265-2372 and we can discuss.

Rob Gabelmann Applications Engineer AER Control Systems

Good stuff by the way.

Gunner

"Lenin called them "useful idiots," those people living in liberal democracies who by giving moral and material support to a totalitarian ideology in effect were braiding the rope that would hang them. Why people who enjoyed freedom and prosperity worked passionately to destroy both is a fascinating question, one still with us today. Now the useful idiots can be found in the chorus of appeasement, reflexive anti-Americanism, and sentimental idealism trying to inhibit the necessary responses to another freedom-hating ideology, radical Islam"

Bruce C. Thornton, a professor of Classics at American University of Cal State Fresno

I do that with my tool grinder and buffer/scotchbrite/wire wheel. They're mounted to the big barn doors on the shop -- if the weather is good I can swing the doors open so most of the mess stays outside.

This got me thinking. The nozzle I have now is pretty effective at sucking up the fines. The heavier grit that escapes is really just a nuisance near the grinder, I don't think any of it travels far enough to be a real problem. An enclosure like you've described would probably contain the bulk of the coarse stuff on the grinder table, even if it wasn't all sucked up by the collector. Is that typically how it works?

I think what I'm doing now is getting most of the dust that's prone to travel far enough to damage other machines, and I'm sure there's room for improvement. What's escaping seems to be more of a nuisance than a real problem, but as long as I've got that big collector running I'd like to suck up as much as I can.

I've got some fresh ideas to try. Thanks to everyone who has responded.

Hey Old Jag. Does your Boyer Schultz have the dust collector in the base? I need instructions on getting to the vacuum motor and also how to get the filter out to clean it.

RWL

I got into the vacuum motor on a Boyar Schultz dust collector base a few years ago. The motor is accessed from the front of the cabinet. But firsr you must remove all the filter elements. The motor is in the rear corner. And a Boyar Schultz service man cautioned me NOT to wash the filter bags, as that would remove the fire retardent chemicals in the filters.

How do you get the filters out of the way? I couldn't see how they were released.

Someone painted my machine, so things on the base don't come apart easily - does the roundish cover on the back come off to expose anything of interest in taking apart the vacuum motor / blower? If it's supposed to come off, I've got to figure out how to pull it since it's painted (glued) now to the rest of the base.

RWL

You must go in from the front. Nothing is accessable on the back of my machine.

The front cover is held by quarter turn screws. Once the cover is off, you will see the filter bags. There are rails on each side running front to back that hold the filters in place. A flat "clamp strip" secures the filters. Once the clamp strip is removed, the filters lift out exposing the blower motor in the rear.

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snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com (John Normile) wrote:

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Does your dust collector have hardware cloth spacers between each pleat, or is that something that some former owner has added?

I loosened the thumb screws, but the right side of the cabinet blocks removing them as a whole unit. It looks like I might be able to work each pleat, one pleat at a time to the left to clear the door, but it's a tight squeeze and I was afraid of tearing the filter's cloth. Is that how you get it out? I took photos, but I haven't had an opportunity to upload them to the dropbox yet.

RWL