Work in progress.....dust collection

[pacwind3]

I have been working on the DC in my shop for over a month. When I saw the frankenvac post, I knew he was on to a great idea. I am trying to create a chip seperator, and it's working, but not to it's full capacity, I still get dust flowing through to the shopvac.
The following 4 pics show the work in progress.
1) the cabinet I enclosed my shopvac in. It is insulated on the inside to reduce the noise. It works great! I just have a few kinks to work out for hose placement.
2) the pic of the seperator I am using. It's a bin I found at walmart for $10. It's supposed to be a container used to hold wrapping paper. It's really thick plastic, square, opaque and about 30" tall. I think it'll work great.
3) the pic of version 1.0 of the top. It's just stuff I had on hand.
4) the pic of version 1.5 of the top. I made a "baffle" between the intake and out. This is to help direct the chips down.

Any ideas or suggestions to help keep the chips in the bin would be great.

[cgallery]

The problem w/ the Frankenvac ultimately was that the incoming airstream kept the debris in the container suspended. I think my advice for you would be to modify your design so that baffle is actually a "T" (leave your baffle but add a horizontal cross-piece to it). This would have the effect of changing the thin, fast airstream into a wide, more slowly moving airstream that would have to crawl around the edges of the baffle to get to the outlet.

Extra points if you make it a "Y". This would have the added benefit of a ramp that would prevent debris buildup.

[poolhound]

I tried something very similar but couldnt get it to work very well. I had a baffle just like yours and it did improve once I added a T as CGallery suggests.

If I am not mistaken from your photos the bin you are using is square. I may be off base but i believe to get the cyclonic action working the container should be round and the inlet should be angled down and towards the wall of the container. This gets a "swirling" action setup that ideally deposits the larger chunks onto the bottom of the bin and away from the suction of the outlet.

I think that nomatter what you do it might be hard to get much better than a half to two/thirds capacity as the top layer begins to get sucked up. If you look at commercial cyclones. They have the cyclonic separator creating the "air spiral" and then yet another collection bin at the bottom accessed via a much smaller Dia. connection. This keeps the separated dust well away from the outlet port.

There are quite a few articles on the net you can find as well as here on the forum. I was looking for one in particular that seemed to have generated a pretty good working design but I couldnt find it. I will keep looking.

[footprintsinconc]

when you say add a T, do yo mean to add the T (butt into the divider) on the inlet side or the outlet side?

[cgallery]

when you say add a T, do yo mean to add the T (butt into the divider) on the inlet side or the outlet side?

The T would be on the inlet side AND the outlet side. What you're trying to do is maximize the distance the air has to travel inside the vessel to get to the outlet. The further it has to travel, the more time debris will have have a chance to fall out of suspension.

[footprintsinconc]

thanks, cgallery.

[JoeyGee]

How about some more pics of your SV enclosure? I have one that I am not real happy with. I am planning on building the one from the most recent FWW Tools and Shops issue, but I would love to see what you did.