For those of you who don't visit ICIX, I built a dust separator to hook up to my shop-vac to (hopefully) keep it from getting clogged up with sawdust. It wound up working great, so I figured I share it with you guys.
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After realizing that the amount of dust I make routing out the pieces for my
sub enclosures, I decided to take a crack at making a dust separator to keep my shop-vac from clogging it's filter and killing itself. While my metalworking skills leave something to be desired, hopefully some of you will find some use for this.
A general overview on cyclonic separation
Some more info
The parts - a 6" diameter x ~2' long steel duct from home depot, a 2' long piece of 2" PVC pipe, and a tube of 3M quick cure 5200 adhesive. Total cost: ~$15 + some spare scraps of MDF I had laying around.
The duct was used to make the body of the cylinder, as well as the cone at the bottom. I cut ~18" off for the cylinder, and the the rest was used for the cone.
A paper cone was made, cut out, and traced onto the remaining part of the duct.
The cone fitted (the small end was trimmed afterwards)
A short (~6") piece of pipe was cut off the 2' piece and one end was shaped to contour to the side of the cylinder. It comes into the cylinder tangentially with a downward angle. A corresponding hole was cut out of the cylinder for the pipe to fit into. 3M 5200 was used to bond the pipe to the sheet metal.
To make the top, I simply cut a circle of 1/2" MDF to side, put a groove into the bottom side, and a hole in the middle for the pipe to fit through. 5200 was again used to seal the joint between the pipe and MDF.
I used a 5 gallon bucket to collect the separated dust. To create a tight fitting lid, I cut a 13" diameter circle of MDF, put a 1/4" deep groove in one side (for the lip of the bucket to sit in). A hole in the middle was cut for the cone to fit into.
Test fitting the bucket in the groove:
Cone being test-fit in the center hole:
Finished lid fit onto the bucket, along with an MDF clamping ring that fits from the bottom and rests against the ribs on the bucket.
One key point to keep in mind is that any air leaks will degrade performance of the dust separator. The velocity of the air coming into the separator is key to separating the dust, and any air leaks will reduce the velocity of the air coming in. All seams and joints were sealed with 5200.
A test fit of everything:
Everything glued together:
After all the glue dried, I layed down some foam tape in the bottom groove on the lid. This will prevent air leaks between the bucket and lid.
