J. Phil Thien's Projects

Pitbull, I didn't have a 1/8" straight bit so I used a 1/4" bit for the groove the Plexiglas sits in. In the 240 degree drop slot area I removed the 1/8" excess caused by my router bit when I made the slot. In the 120 degree area, I just left the "extra" I do think that it would have been pretty difficult getting the top on if the kerf were cut at 1/8".

I put a groove to hold the tail piece on the inlet side. You can see that here.



At the other end I stopped the groove where I wanted the plexi to stop. That gave me a surface to press against to keep the plexi tight to the outside of the groove in the drop slot area. That is visible here.



I then sealed all wood to plexi junctions with clear silicon.
A simple 1/4" plywood trammel was used for all of the routing operations. I used a 8" x 24" piece of plywood and drew a line down the center of the long dimension. This gave me an easy reference point for determining the bit to center point distances. So far it looks promising.

I am thinking about cutting a chamfer in this area. I think that having the drop slot being made of 1 1/4" material that air that is in rotation may hit the end of the drop slot as a wall. If I chamfer the area to keep the debris moving down, it may help with the scrubbing action.

I got interested in the baffle after making numerous end grain cutting boards for Christmas. I found that my old system that consisted of a Griz 1029 connected to a trash can lid (grizzly) separator with flex pipe and 4" SDW ducting wasn't giving me the performance I needed. There was a lot of discussion on the Thien baffle over on Woodnet which led me here.

Here is what I have gotten done so for. I am upgrading my main runs to 6" metal ducting (from PSI) and am using a plastic 30 gallon drum for collection. Because I did not want to loose barrel capacity I decided to build the baffle as a top hat. Here is a shot from the bottom of the baffle. As you can see I used stick on weather stripping on the barrel contact surface. The bottom plate of the baffle is two layers of 3/4" ply and one layer of 1/2" ply



For the curved area of the baffle I used some 1/8" Plexiglas or poly acrylic that I had in the shop. Here is the assembled baffle.



I got rid of the plywood spacers and used oak to prevent splitting. where the inlet pipe goes into the baffle I doubled the plywood to 2 layers of 3/4" ply just to provide more contact area on the pipe. The clamp on the barrel is there to keep the top of the barrel in a perfect circle. Without the clamp the barrel would rest to a somewhat oval shape.

Here I have the blower mounted on the wall. The duct from the baffle is 6" in diameter and fits 3" below the top inside of the baffle in its current position. It is a tight slip fit sealed with more weather stripping. I am going to add a handle/hinge/chain contraption to hold the baffle for drum emptying. The baffle can move up and down on the outlet duct providing clearance to empty the drum.



I won't have much shop time until after Christmas to install the filter and bag.

Chuck, the problem that I am having is the drum sander producing so much fine dust that the bag becomes clogged. The bag has such a thick layer of fine dust that the DC's CFM is reduced to the point where dust is no longer being collected from the sander. If I turn the DC off and beat the bag, it helps restore some of the loss of suction. However, to get full CFM restored I have to remove the bag to get rid of the fine dust. Simply shaking the bag down leaves most of the powder laying on the baffle just to go back into the top bag when the DC is turned back on. I don't have a problem with the system with any other machine, just the sander.

Steve

Pitbull, that really looks good. Do you plan to leave you system configured as it currently is? I have all of my components and am going to start building a tophat similar to what you have done, but I think that I am going to disassemble my DC and hard pipe from the separator to the DC blower. Keeping the flex pipe between the two would simplify emptying the container though.

My biggest concern and reason for modifying my current setup is the extremely fine dust that I get from the drum sander. I made eight end grain cutting boards for Christmas presents and found that I had to remove my top bag and turn it inside out and clean it in between each cutting board. Prior to doing that much drum sanding I only had to shake the bag to dump some of the fines into the lower bag.
Have you run you system connected to a ?powder? producer yet? I am curious to see how many ?fines? may have ended up in the filter. (I am also adding a Wynn filter as part of my conversion)

Steve

I am in the planning stages of a "tophat" style baffle. (Similar to VAWoodworkers) I currently have my DC in a corner of the shop with branches running down the two adjacent walls. The machines that produce the largest amount of dust and chips (Planer, jointer and drum sander) are on the left hand branch. Therefore, I would like to have the inlet to the separator come in from the left. However, the rotation of the Griz 1029 is in the opposite direction.

Does this really matter? I read on Bill Pentz's site that you should have the cyclone and impeller moving in the same direction for optimum air flow.

I don't think (completely unscientific) that the suction side of the impeller swirls the air, but this is a complete quesstimation on my part.

Any thoughts on this??


Steve