Asphyxiated my separator today!

[retired2]

Today for the first time my separator failed me, amd caused me one monstrous headache.  Actually, I overwhlemed it till it finally succumbed.

If you want to give this a try, here is what you need to do.  Start by getting about 100 bd.ft. of wet cypress, it helps if it is covered with a little snow and ice.  Just use a paint scaper to remove the ice, and promptly start planing.  The wet cypress will produce very long, very wet, and very clingy shavings.  Don't bother to look at the separator while you are planing.  When the thickness planer starts throwing shavings back at you, the waste drum is full.  Please note, this does not take very long!

By this time the waste drum will be overfilled, and the separator will have ingested enough shavings to choke it to death.  You won't even be able to see the bell mouth in the center of this giant birds nest. Sadly, the normal setup with a Delta 50-760 DC does not lend itself to an emergency tracheotomy.  I knew what had to be done so I started by removing and dumping the over-filled waste drum.  This was followed by tediously roto-rooting the separator chamber till it was clean.  Oh yes, the filter bag and the plastic bag below it were not happy either, so they had to be cleaned.

After a lot of lost time I thought I was ready to go again.  Sadly, the DC was still not breathing - the filter bag just hung there limp.  I feared the worst, a plug in the main, but when I removed the flex hose connected to the inlet of the separator, it still was not breathing.  How can that be, the separator is whistle clean? Is the impeller not turning?  Yes, it is, but pulling the motor and impeller looks like the only way to know what is going on inside.

More lost time, but when the motor and impeller were out I was able to look down the throat of the inlet piping and immediately see the problem.  Remember those slick 1-1/2" plastic tube air straighteners I installed that improved the performance of my system?  Well, they weren't intended to pass 3" long wet cypress shavings.  They were packed full, and not allowing anything to pass.  So, with the motor out it was easy to push the plugs out.

After an hour or more, everything was back in working order.  However, the rest of the day did not go much better.  I had several more birds nests, even when the waste drum was less than half full.  A wider drop slot might have helped a little, but many of the plugs started when shavings caught in the end if the drop slot, and in seconds they would pile up like a snow drift, and promply close off the entire length of the slot.

Note to self: next time design to minimize blockages and facilitate their removal.

[dabullseye]

sound like u need a shelix head for the planer. i have a bryd shelix  head in my dewalt 735. best thin i ever purchased. dewalt blades area joke.
http://shelixheads.com
here is a quote from you "I'm not sure how many times I've emptied my drum since I built the top hat, but I know I will never have to empty the plastic bag under the filter in my life time.  There might be a cup full of fines in there now."
think you cursed yourself. im just wondering why you would want to plane green wet wood i think resaw would have been the way to go till it dried next yr. 

[retired2]

I have looked at the helix heads, but at age 70 I just can't justify that investment.  I would love to have it. 

Here's the story on the green lumber.  Decided to build the kids (adults with grandchildren) four Adirondack chairs.  Priced white oak from a local hardwood dealer and he strongly advised against using kiln dried lumber for outdoor furniture.  He said it would check worse than green lumber.  He suggested air dried.  Could not find air dried in white oak, cedar or cypress.  But, less than two miles away is a lumber yard that sells cypress to the mushroom industry in southeast PA.  They don't need any drying time on the wood for their application.

In any case, this yard has really nice cypress, but it is green and rough.  So, I decided to go that route.  Most of the lumber is oversized.  As an example, their 2" stock is actually 2-1/8", and what I need in the end is 1-1/2" dressed.  Same is true for other sizes as well.  So, I decided to rough size all the finished pieces and let them dry several months in my shop with a dehumidifier helping the process along.  What I was doing when I choked the DC system was planning the 2-1/8" stock down to 1-3/4'.  The idea was this would speed up the drying a little bit, and still leave some excess stock to straighten anything that warps.  Well, there are a lot of planer shavings between 2-1/8" and 1-3/4", and haste makes waste, and in this case the waste was my time, not shavings.  Oh, with regards to resawing.  I am limited to 6" on my Powermatic bandsaw, and much of the stock is six inches and over, and joining and planning allows me to start truing up the stock.

There is an old rule of thumb that air drying takes one year per inch of thickness, so you can see I am trying to expedite that process as much as possible.  Much of the cypress I chose was selected for the quarter sawn grain.  That tends to be much more stable during drying.  And if I use the wood before it is 100% dry I think I will be O.K., especially since there are a lot of narrow pieces in a chair, and I'm not building fine furniture this time.