In my last video, I covered making the blower for my
dust extractor. And in this video, I'm gonna cover
making the separator, which is kind of a cross between a
thien-baffle and a cyclone.
I made the cylindrical housing for my perpetrator
by marking a bunch of arc pieces.
on a thick piece of hardwood. Cutting it out with
the bandsaw and then gluing those together
like you would a segment to turning.
And then before gluing the final half’s together
I sanded the inside round.
It's important that I get a really good seal with the
bucket so I added this ledge here, which I cut
to precisely the radius of the bucket.
And now if I place the bucket against the ledge here
I can place the ledge on the other side. Then I'm
gonna glue it in place.
And I'm just gonna clamp that in place for now
to check it.
So, that looks good. So, I can glue that right here
and that'll hopefully give me a good seal.
So, this is the collection bucket. And here's my
separator. Separator is sort of a cross between a
thien-baffle and a cyclone.
So, I made this thing much deeper than it would be
on a thien-baffle
because I wanted to have more space for the air to
circulate around. I'm sort of thinking this is like
a cyclone except the bottom is cut off. And I've got this
baffle in here instead. I added a slightly larger
disc in here because I wanted to make that gap smaller.
So, I'd rather not spin the air inside the bucket
and I figure the air can circulate
in here a little bit better.
And on top of this fits this lid,
which picks the air up from the middle.
So, I really got to spin the air up in here and
I made this injector nozzle
that fits on here and it takes a 2 and a half inch hose.
And it's actually a little bit constrained on here,
so that it really shoots the air in here.
And really, hopefully, gets that air going.
And there's nothing on here to catch it, so
it should just go round and round like crazy.
Here's the first injector that I made, which is made
for just a regular 1 and a half inch hose.
But I found the hose has just got too much air resistance.
So, I wanted to move to a bigger hose.
So I got this connector piece here
And made the nozzle around it. And it just sort of tapers
into this narrow slot to shoot the air through there.
Well, my dust extractor isn't finished.
But it definitely can suck.
So, let's try it out.
Let's see how we did.
That's full of sawdust. That's good.
Down here, looks like everything is clean.
Let's see how we did on the filter.
Well, we got some dust in here.
So the separation isn't entirely perfect.
I still end up with a bit of crap in the filter.
But I think I can fill, quite a few buckets, before this filter
needs cleaning. Right after that test, I did another test
dumping the contents of my whole bandsaw sawdust
drawer through the dust extractor.
And I sucked in too fast and actually managed
to stall the circulation inside the separator.
And then the separator stopped working and
a lot of dust just completely jammed up my
filter. So, it's not a foolproof type of separator.
But, I can just clean the filter with my air compressor.
After my initial tests, I built a stand to hold it
all together and I put wheels on it too.
I wanted to make it easy to change the bucket on here.
So, I added this spring-loaded lever.
So, I just push down on that and the bucket comes out.
And I can put another bucket in.
There. The filter I'm using is an airborne
micro-particle reduction filter.
Really just a fancy name for a furnace filter.
So, how loud is this unit?
Well, next to a shop vac you can hardly hear it.
It's not very loud. It's hard to hear it over the shop vac.
I made the small dust extractor mostly to use
for things like saws, sanders, and routers.
But, it just barely keeps up with my thickness planer.
And in my next video, I'll explore the performance of
that separator in more detail.