J. Phil Thien's Projects

Well thank you so much to this forum and Phil for his awesome invention of the baffle.

I'm pretty much a cheap skate and don't really have funds to buy fancy tools so I will most often make my own stuff.  When I realized I could make my own blower fan and scroll then found the Thien baffle design I was thrilled.  I also made my own filter baffle and sourced big rig filters to use too.

So here are my pictures of the set up.  It works amazing with my drum sander there.  My plan is to plumb the rest of my tools soon.

The pano photo is of my full 185sft shop.  I make acoustic guitars as a hobby.

I'll add a picture of the Thien baffle in my barrel when I need to dump it.

Thanks again.  I hope this can be some inspiration to someone else making their own DC system.

Hello folks.  This is my first post here.  Been searching for my idea but couldn't find it.

So I have a 55 gallon open top water barrel which I plan on using for my collector bin (I'm going to cut the bottom off so it's not as large though).  I want to use the factory top for the top part of my "hat" with the baffle hanging down into the barrel.  But as you can see the barrel widens from the opening to roughly 3-4" down.

So my thinking is to make the baffle the same size as the opening (which is 17-1/2" dia) and suspend it from the barrel top with all-tread (4 pieces).  Measuring the inside diameter of the barrel come out at 20" so if I left all the "sides" of the baffle open that would give me a gap of 1-1/4" all around.

Has anyone tried this before?  I don't want to do something that's not going to work.  Is the 120* closure of the baffle necessary?

Here's a picture of the barrel I have (or very close to mine)