J. Phil Thien's Projects

Here you go, first one is bucket sealed onto tophat. Second one is with the cams rotated so it drops.  You can adjust how far up it goes by changing the thickness of the platform.  There is a groove on the bottom of my tophat that the rim of the bucket fits into for a good seal.

I made a simple cam style lift with some lag bolts through the bottom of my support frame, and 2 2x4's with rounded over edges under a platform.  rotate the 2x's to the horizontal position to remove the bin.  rotate them to the vertical position to lift the bin enough to push it against the foam seal on the bottom of the tophat.  for a heavy 55 gal drum you might want to put handles on the 2x4 to make it a bit easier to rotate.

You don't need much travel to disengage the drum from the seals to drag it out.

usps is the best way to ship to Canada, at least from our perspective.  Shipping with ups or fedex usually results in hideous brokerage fees (more than the cost of the item purchased)
You may have to fill out some customs forms, but where it is such a low value item, you may get away without too much paperwork.

Awesome.  I currently have one of the not so self centering dowel jigs you describe, and would love to get something more versatile.  Once you post more info if it ticks all the boxes I am looking for I will hopefully place an order.  I am guessing there will be a bit of a shipping charge to ship to Canada.

Just saw the new dowel jig, looks good so far.  Can it be configured to do dowel holes in a panel, like if I wanted to dowel shelves together for a bookcase?

A seperator/cyclone generally gets the bigger chips/dust and the filter catches the small stuff.  It sounds like you need a diesel particulate filter on the exhaust. https://www.dieselnet.com/tech/dpf.php

Quote from: qtron on April 18, 2017, 06:34:17 AM
Cansomeone please tell me what is meant by scrubbing?

Scrubbing is the removal of collected waste from a separator into the filter or shop vac.

Hopefully there will be enough outcry that dropbox will make it at least somewhat easy to maintain the links to pictures.

Retired, I think you can set the individual items in your "public" folder to be shared and the path remains the same.  It may be worth investigating so it saves you the hassle of tracking down every forum post you have made.

Look for Marius Hornberger on youtube, he built a small blower/Thien baffle system for his CNC machine that will give you some good ideas.

Quote from: phil (admin) on February 16, 2016, 03:53:13 PM

That seems to be a problem no matter what.  I think there is a perfect size to weight ratio for sawdust that likes to stay animated.  The same thing happens with cyclones.  As long as it doesn't sneak out the exit tube, it doesn't matter.

Good to know. 

I have a clear top on the "push" separator for my planer and the big chips from the planer usually don't even get a full rotation before dropping below the baffle, I guess I was expecting to see the same thing.  Makes sense that the lighter dust from the table saw might not drop below the baffle right away.

So I managed to get most of the day today in the shop.  I go the frame built to hold the blower above the tophat, and I built a cam mechanism to raise/lower the barrel into place under the tophat.  I managed to get some piping in place to my tablesaw last weekend, so I am actually up and running and collecting dust.

I don't have a proper filter yet, and when things warm up from the rather chilly -12C it has been here lately I will be venting outside.

As retired2 mentioned above, this is essentially a "double high" tophat, but my inlet is in a less than optimum place, it is 1" below the center, when it would be best to be entering close to the top.

Having a clear top lets me see what is going on inside, and I can see that some of the dust is getting caught up high in the airstream and just keeps going around and around.  From the look of the bags I have on the outlet, not much is making it past the separator, but time will tell, as I have only run it for a few cuts.

I fired up my blower tonight to do some testing, I have 2 30Ga. elbows and a ~20" section of 30Ga. pipe between the blower and my in-progress separator.  I blocked the inlet and the plastic pail started to crush, but the pipe didn't move a bit.  This setup is extremely leaky at the moment though, everything was just dry fit, no tape on the pipe joints, and the tophat is just held together with gravity (and suction with the blower on) at the moment.  With a tightly sealed system, and a rigid container, I would guess the 30Ga. pipe may implode, but not sure about the elbows, they are quite a bit stiffer because they are only short sections and the ridges in them increase the stiffness.

I'm curious what you are doing to raise /lower the can (or thee tophat itself) for emptying?  I am working on a system right now and want to do a similar wood frame to hold all of the components.

We will see what happens.  The picture is a little deceiving, the inlet is more centered than it looks, but it is a bit closer to the bottom than the top.  Unfortunately due to placement of the collector, it has to be oriented this way otherwise I would have to add a piece of flex or additional elbows for the tophat to connect to the piping on the wall.  I am trying to keep the amount of flex and the number of elbows to a minimum to reduce losses.

I will try it this way and see what happens, it has an arcrylic window on the top so I can see what the dust is doing inside, hopefully this lets me see if I need to make any changes.