Invent Design Make

Responses to Cyclone build part 3 – the ‘Air Outlet’

1. Bob Young
   November 13th, 2011 at 11:01 pm

   A quick question – I appreciate what you have accomplished and published and was going to attempt a construct for my use. However, I find products here in US are in inch-foot dimension thickness and length/width and wonder if you think it would be a satisfactory separator built to the closest measurements derived from conversion to inch/foot metrics?

   Thanks for your time now and in creating web info.
   Bob Young


2. Bongo
   November 13th, 2011 at 11:51 pm

   Hi Bob, thanks for the comment.
   That should not be too much of a problem – as long as the measurement conversions are close…


3. Colin Waters
   April 9th, 2012 at 4:58 pm

   Hello,

   I am a member of a woodworking group in the UK – Southern Fellowship of Woodworkers (see http://www.sfwoodworkers.co.uk) and we recently had an evening where 3 members gave a talk to all the others attending on the subject of dust extraction. I gave a talk on my own workshop system where I use a simple Axminster dust extractor of about 2HP. But a friend has made a very simple separator which removes circa 90% of the dust on a system using the same extractor as mine. Therefore, I would like to build my own separator to your design but I need a 100mm diameter equivalent area inlet and a 150 mm outlet pipe.

   Could I scale up you design and still use polycarbonate sheet? I have read your comment on minimum radius possible with 0.75mm sheet but would a cone of larger scale have sufficient rigidity in 0.75mm sheet do you think.

   I think you have done a wonderful job on your website.

   Regards,

   Colin


4. Bongo
   April 10th, 2012 at 4:25 pm

   Hi Colin,
   Sounds like you have a really good thing going on there with the SFW!

   Be aware that 90% material removal is not that good really (unless you are only sucking up very fine dust). For ‘general’ woodworking dust a simple drop box can achieve something like 90%, but it lets almost all the super small particles through (the ones that are most dangerous for you and clogging for your filter).

   You should have no problem scaling up the cyclone design. Use Bill’s spreadsheet to get the cyclone’s ultimate dimensions, then modify them so that you can make it from polycarbonate.

   I would suggest upping the thickness of the polycarbonate, as the radius of the cyclone will be larger – you could go 1mm maybe even 1.5mm. Then As long as you wrap the polycarbonate up in layers (one full overlap should do it), as I did, it should be fine.

   Let me know how it goes!


5. Colin Waters
   April 10th, 2012 at 4:30 pm

   Hi Bongo,

   Thanks for your comments. You are right that my friend’s separator is a simple drop box. So I thought that I would achieve much better results with a cyclone separator.

   I will try 1mm polycarbonate.

   Thanks,

   Colin


6. Ryan
   April 11th, 2018 at 9:08 pm

   I was just wondering if you could push the dust through a cyclonic dust separator instead of sucking it.


7. Bongo
   April 12th, 2018 at 9:29 am

   Ryan,
   I’m not actually sure sorry…