Hi everyone.
Let's make progress on the metal dust collector.
You may want to take a look at the last 3 episodes if this is all new to you.
I am currently cutting the panel that was covering the front side of the dust collector
so that I an turn the lower part into a door to retrieve the collected metal dust.
As I mentioned before, I do not have any sheet metal tools and am cobbling this together
with whatever spare steel and tools I have in the shop.
Most of the work here is no longer on the dust collection mechanics but rather closing
up the outside without too many air gaps.
As I am maknig this up as I go, I attach most panels with screws so that they can be removed
if I need to get back to the insides of the monster.
I am still wondering what I should call it in the end.
Frankenstein comes to mind but that's a little bit long for a spray painted stencils.
Drilling into steel without a drill press is also suprisingly time consuming; fortunately
with the locking wheels, I can press reasonably hard without it moving.
Instead of tapping the holes, I just tag weld a nut on the inside which is fast and sufficient.
Now that the upper part of the front panel is attached, I have to figure out the door.
The hinges - which are store bought - should be fairly easy to attach.
Easy is of course a word very easy to say but rarely encountered in reality.
You will see what I mean in a moment.
For now, I am center punching the holes and then will drill them on the drill press which
is much faster than drilling by hand.
I plan on welding a nut on the inside again so that the screws have something to tighten
against.
In principle, this is super easy.
Tighten the screw against the nut and then a few easy tag welds, remove the screws and
done.
The challenge here is that it's easy to weld too much and the heat also causes expansion
and sometimes the screws do not want to come out again.
This is exactly what happened here.
The impact driver just sheared off the screw.
Let's see if some extra leverage helps with getting the broken screw out.
Unfortunately, extra leverage just resulted in more shearing.
Instead of giving up, I am drilling and tapping until the nut is serviceable again.
Due to the way in which I placed the tag welds, I had to file off a little bit of excess to
make the door fit but that also did not take a long time.
In hindsight, I would definitely have tag welded those nuts where the welds would not
get in the way.
Oh well.
Here is another questionable decision.
I decided that I would weld the other side of the hings instead of trying to drill and
place nuts.
My reasoning was that if I ever had to replace the hinges, I would just grid them off.
I thought I would just buy some kind of latch at the hardware store but they don't really
have what I need.
Instead, I am taking inspriation from the trusty metal band saw in the shop and decide
that forging the latch handle is the way to go.
This is definitely one of the benefits of doing all the work in a blacksmith shop.
While precision is something I am limited on, creative transformation of steel is always
an option.
The trick with the handle and latch construction in the bandsaw is that the latch is driven
by a square hole.
As you will see in a moment that's where blacksmithing can help as well.
The flange I am forging here is meant to secure the handle on the outside so that it does
not move through the hole where the handle engages the latch.
One of the challenges here is to keep everything centered.
As you can see I am off center and will grind the excess away.
To hold down the latch on the inside, I am drilling a hole that I will tap for a 1/4in
screw later.
Before I can do that and before I will attach the square latch driver, Let's forge in the
handle.
If you look closely, you will see where some of the steel looks messed up.
While moving the camera, I unfortunately left the steel for too long in the fire and parts
of it burned away.
That said just being able to quickly forge a handle feels very empowering.
You should try blacksmithing one of these days.
There we go.
Handle for the latch is finish and instead of using the transformative power of blacksmithing
I will just weld on the square driver.
As I had already drilled the hole I now just need to tap it to cut it in the threads for
the coarse 1/4in screw.
One of the problems with this construction is that the sheet metal while quite thick
is still pretty flexible.
Ideally, I would have a bending break to bend the edges to give it more stability.
I don't yet know if that's going to be a problem in terms of creating a vacuuum inside of the
dust collector.
The one ingredient that is still missing is a piece of square steel that can move the
latch.
I will just weld that on.
This could have been done with blacksmithing but would have been much more involved.
As you can see a chamfered the corners to have more surface area for welding.
This should be sufficient for it to hold together.
The chamfers are important as I need to file the weld beats back to the square of the steel.
And I need enough surface to still hold it together.
The square hole for the latch is 1/2in wide.
I am drilling a 1/2in wide hole and will then use more hot work to drift it to square.
Overall, drifting is much faster than file work or using square broaches.
And precision is not really a primary consideration here.
Finally I need to create a large enough hole in the sheet metal as well and that will require
filing as I don't have any larger drill bits at the shop.
Let's put it together and see how well it works.
Oops.
Remember when I talked about the welds and the chamfer.
I didn't have enough.
Let's do this again.
Much better.
There is not all that much work remaining.
I have to close up all sides.
Make a place for the filters to go and make an inlet.
My process is the same, drill the holes all the way through the angle iron and weld a
nut on the inside for the screw to grip.
I had a little bit of a transition but some weather stripping will close that up.
I told you I am just cobbling it together.
This is about as far as we are getting in this video but let's do a test run.
The video will actually uncover some data that I otherwise would not have.
As I had mentioned the thien baffle is meant to separate out most of the metal dust.
To test this I just collected whaterever had accumulate underneath the grinder.
As I turn the dust collector on observe the exhaust of it.
I was quite surprised how much fine dust made it all the way through.
It's not really surprising though.
However, most of the stuff is at the bottom and waited to be taken out.
The filters should take care of the fine dust.
There you have.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
Thanks for everyone in Patreon and in the next video we will see the filters and probably
a real test as well.
See you next time.