Nate1778

I have cussed my last bag cuss. After months of cussing at the filter bag cloggage and plastic bag filling I have had it. My DC really sucks well until you introduce dust to it. I have decided that I am going to vent my 1200 cfm unit into the great outdoors. My only problem with doing this in the past was the covering the roof and clogging the gutters with chips and saw dust. After researching a bit (and there is more out there than I care to know) and reading up on 2 stage lids and building a cyclone to use with my current collector, I ran across this guy on eBay. He had exactly what I had in mind and a fraction of the cost it would have cost me to build if you consider time as money. I got the larger unit ordered for $234 delivered. The unit will be here hopefully next week and I will get it hooked up soon after. The only downside I have read to it is it is not as effective as Bill Pentz's design but since I am going to run strait pipes instead of a filter this should work perfect. I will keep you guys up to date and if any of you have experience with this cyclone please do share. Yes I am in a detached garage so Carbon Monoxide is not an issue. Just figured I would share in case anybody else is tired of cussing.

Woodchuck1957

I looked at going that route also Nate, but I allready had one of those plastic garbage can 2 stage collector lids and the only reason I didn't like it was it took up too much extra space in my shop, plus it was allways one more thing to setup before working in my garage / shop, so alot of times I never used it. For someone that has more space than I do and their tools are pretty much in a permanent spot it doesn't look like a bad way to go. For me I'm going with a complete cyclone unit that takes up less space.

Nate1778

Excellent points, I hated to have to sell the perfectly good dust collector that I owned. It is currently located in a lean to so the air quality in the shop never concerned me, well at least the dust coming from the collector. My problem has always been that after cleaning the filter bag the thing is awesome, but do a bit of sanding or MDF work and the CFM reduces by half, and its frustrating. The thing I like about the above unit it is it is eventually modifiable so that a dedicated more powerful impeller and motor can be added. If this possibility wasn't there I probably would have gone the 2-stage can route. The other downfall to the 2-stage lid is I want to jump up to a 6" trunk.

Have you decided on a cyclone? The Clearvue units look nice and effective.

Woodchuck1957

So far the plan is to try out a Penn State Industries Tempest142, but they are currently on back order.

Nate1778

Just got the cyclone via Fedex, its in great shape and exactly what I had envisioned when I started thinking about building one. For the price this thing is hard to beat. Heck 4' X 8' sheets of galvanized are running $60.00 right now. Seams and inlet/outlets are all soldered and everything seams fairly strait and true, for sheet metal that is. It is pretty basic for a cyclone as it does not have the vein on the inside or square inlet, but seeing I am going to vent outside I will live with the 90% that is advertised. I will post pics as I get it set up.

Woodchuck1957

A couple things I noticed with that setup is, how do you mount it to the wall ? It looks too tipsy to stand by itself. The other thing is in the picture they show it siting directly ontop of the garbage can lid, if you look at most cyclones they have a short flexible hose going to the can, then you can lift the lid and pull the can out. I'm not overly wild about that 180 degree elbow ontop of the cyclone either, I would change that to a long radius 90 degree elbow. 24 gauge metal seems a bit light, most cyclones that I know of are around 16 gauge. I think they probably have a pretty good product, it just needs to be thought out a little more.

Nate1778

The thing is only the cyclone, cone attached to a drum with an Inlet, an Outlet and the trash chute. Pretty much what I would have built in about 6 days of cussing with sheet metal. Nice part here is I don't have 6 days of cussing and it looks better than anything I could fabricate. The 24ga is fairly stout, keep in mind the Clearview units are plastic. As with most cyclones that you buy without a stand you either need to hang them from chains like Smitty did or construct some brackets. I am going to use 1/2" MDF and cut holes in the middle, one for the base of the cone and the other for the cylinder. I will use 2X4s on all 4 corners as legs. I am going to make it wide enough to fit a metal trash can through the legs easily. Your absolutly right though I plan on connecting the trash can with a flexible hose. I also was not a huge fan of the 180 degree turn, I think this guy had gotten some feedback and has started using 8" pipe for the Outlet, I am going to run 8" pipe all the way down to the 6" inlet of my collector. I am hoping that the additional pipe size will do away with any of the constrictions of the 180 degree turn. Keep in mind my intent for the cyclone was to make my single stage ventable to the outside with out blowing chips everywhere and to keep the dust bag from ever being in the equation again. Thus far in my limited use of dust collection and woodworking, that bag is the one crippling factor in my mind, even over the use of 4" hose. Of coarse I am not running more than 20' at any given time either. Time has been tight but I hope to start messing with it this weekend. Here is my 3rd grade "Paintshop" blueprint of my design. Man I suck at the computer...........

Woodchuck1957

Nate, the way I understand things, cyclones are more efficient, and the bags or cartridge shouldn't get as dirty as fast. You may want a bag on your DC for back preasure, without a bag it might be hard on the motor, something you may want to look into. A 8" line on a 1200 cfm DC might be a little overkill also, I would stick with the same size ducting as the 6" inlet on your DC, reduce it at the cyclone. If you have to make a 180 degree turn I would suggest you use 2 large radius 90 degree elbows., and use a large radius elbow at the bottom where it goes into the DC.

Nate1778

Well I got a chance to get this thing together this past weekend, with a brand new set of twins in the mix it took all 3 days to get it together, but there were a lot of baby bottle breaks. There were also a lot of daddy, grown up bottle breaks. I'll admit it looks like a "Frankenstein" meets 1970's robot. I used a bit of anything to get it together. I got depressed making the adapter for the exhaust on the dust collector, but I found an alternative, I used a plastic planting pot and it actually worked great. Lots of rivets and duct tape abound and wah lah, got it fired up without it falling apart.

The initial firing did not have the 4" reducer on the intake of the cyclone so it was 6" all the way through. With out a bag filter (strait pipes) this thing produced a suck I had never scene before. The cyclone made a sound that can best be described as a tornado, or freight train. It actually sounded really good, you know in a manly grunt, Tim Allen way. I then added the reducer to 4" and hooked it up to my normal dust collector hook ups in my shop. Once the 4" was hooked up the tornado sound was greatly reduced. Although the 4" line had an unbelievable amount of suck it was not even comparable to the 6". I didn't notice any issues with the motor warming up running the strait pipe and may even consider adding some 6" trunks to a couple of my machines in the future. It was improved over what I am used to by at least 1000%, even with the limiting 4" line.

Its first test was my table saw that had been filled to the DC port with MDF dust and hardwood shavings (don't ask). So I fired the collector up and started cleaning. The one thing I noticed was that the suction never lets up, it never weakened. This kind of cleaning in the past would have taken a couple of bag shaking sessions. So after cleaning out half of the saws dust I handed the hose off to the step son and put him to work. I then walked out and looked at the stack coming out of the roof and did notice a stream of very fine dust coming out of the stack, not much but it was noticeable. I then looked at the plastic collection bag on the collector and there was nothing in it so I would assume that the size of dust making it though the cyclone was light enough to make it up through the stack and not collect in the bag. I felt this wasn't bad for the amount of dust we were sucking up. I mean picture us sticking the hose down into large piles of dust and just taking the hose and collector to the limit.

After we were done with that I went out to my "dust" pile out back and got a 5 gal bucket of some red oak planer chippings and had the boy suck those up. Those produced no dust out of the stack and no residual dust in the plastic bag. After removing the 3/4 full trash can of dust collected I would say that this particular cyclone collects nearly 100% of all dust larger than MDF type dust. I would say that it collects 85% of all fine dust, although there was clearly a visible lite stream coming out of the stack there was a huge amount that went into the can. I will also say it is nice to just take the can out and dump it as opposed to messing with the plastic bag and using pliers and 4 letter expletives to install and disassemble.

Over all I am very happy. The amount of suction I have now is night and day compared to what I had, even after cleaning the filter bag. I also love the consistency in the suction, it never slows down. Even with a filter bag I feel this cyclone would greatly reduce the amount bag clogging and extend the amount of time between cleaning substantially. Would I go out and buy this set up if I were looking for my first collector, NO. Is it a viable solution to the single stage collector you already have, ABSOLUTELY. The one other downfall is the footprint, I now have another item in my lean to which I have space for but some may not.

I am happy with the new setup and would highly recommend it to anyone whom is tired of the filter bag and doesn't want to spend the ~$1000+ on a new cyclone. I figure I have about $250 into this extra setup, although I had a lot of this stuff on hand, not to mention what I already had into my single stage collector (Jet 1200 1.5hp). I have no meters, just a seat of the pants feel and I would say that I am sucking the max CFM that can be sucked through a 4" line.

Here are some pics, they were taken this morning as I was heading out to work. No the Barbie Jeep is not mine. I'll try and get some better pics and post them when time is available.

Gerry KIERNAN

That looks like a pretty impressive cyclone unit Nate.

Gerry