Shopsmith Forums

I had to show this to all of you. My girlfriend's son is an Engineering Student at Oregon State University. Several weeks ago, I was telling him I needed to buy a cyclone separator for my shop vac. His reply:, "We can make one". Today he put together this prototype in about 4 hrs. I was impressed.

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I picked up a 33 gal clean barrel from work. He says, we can make one out of that.

Cool. Keep us posted on "the big one".

Now there is a real engineer. Simple solution to the problem. All of the basics are there. Thank you for sharing the idea and saving us alot of money.

Hi,

I like it! The use of an exoskeleton was a clever idea.

When my kids were younger we purchased this coupling that connected two such bottles. You would put water in one and then turn it upside down and give it a little swirl and then watch the "tornado". I think we might still have it somewhere.

Thanks for sharing!

Ed

reible wrote:Hi,

I like it! The use of an exoskeleton was a clever idea.

When my kids were younger we purchased this coupling that connected two such bottles. You would put water in one and then turn it upside down and give it a little swirl and then watch the "tornado". I think we might still have it somewhere.

Thanks for sharing!

Ed

Those connectors are still available, Ed! My wife bought one a few months ago.

Very cool, I think the kid will go far.

I picked up a nice 30 gallon barrel from work. We need to figure out the size of the top canister which needs to be at least 3 times the diameter of the vacuum or dust collection hose. Most shop vacs and the SS dust collector are 2-1/2 in diameter. The part we are a little fuzzy on, yet is the size of the funnel. It needs to be big enough for the larger chips from jointers and planers, but still able to collect the much smaller particles.

Shydragon, You might want to take a look over at Bill Pentz website. There is a wealth of information on dust collectors and is also a Excel spreadsheet that will tell you the sizes things need to be by plugging in a few numbers.

http://billpentz.com/woodworking/Cyclon ... loneSizing

Found the link to the excel sheet. http://billpentz.com/woodworking/Cyclon ... 080120.xls

If you dont have Microsoft Excel you can always use OpenOffice which is free. It is found here. http://why.openoffice.org/index.html


I also just re read your post. I believe you should be using a 6 inch Diameter down to 2.5 drop for the funnel. I believe it was 12 inches tall when I was planning mine back in the day. I was thinking of using 6 inch pvc pipe from lowes and sheet metal for the rest. After I started pricing everything out I ended up going with the Dust Deputy shop vac setup for 59 dollars. The excel sheet with give you the dimensions for the Clearvue Shop vac Cyclone as they use Bill Pentz formula to build theirs. Either way good luck and let us know how it goes.