vac/dust collector

Hey Cabeto,
I don't know how your building is set up but in an ideal situation you'll have your vac motor/bag located in a seperate room, closet, or outside with door for easy emptying. You can run your pvc, or metal piping to a good dust collection system pretty far with no problems. Some have warned about using pvc piping because of possible static electrical sparking, but my research shows it's less of a chance than being hit by lightning while surfing in Antartica. If you have a portable smaller dust collection system you can roll it to the location of whatever machine or tool you like, then roll it away when the machine work is completed.

Maybe it's just an old age, purist, agro, thing, but when shaping a surfboard I feel the dust and shavings everywhere is just part of the trip. When the machining is done, clean everything up, then get into the fine shaping, hand-work, sanding, touchy-feely stuff. That said however, there's good arguement for dust collection systems in any shop. Enjoy the Ride!

Hey Cabeto, are you shaping boards in Costa Rica, and if so is there any trouble getting blanks and glass and resin.

Cabeto, Forgot to ask where you're located in CR? Glad you're stoked about the vac system - hope it all works out.

i hooked up a device called "the long ranger" to my vac and it is soooooo nice. it is basically just a remote control system so you don't have to leave the vac running all the time. it is around $80 for a 110v and a bit more for a 220v, many woodworking supply houses carry it, try Amazon.com or Woodcraft, Woodcraft for sure that is where i bought mine. I just wear the remote on my apron, and hit on and off as needed. really keeps the noise down. it goes through walls no problem if your dust collector is in another room. i also heard that Clark Foam makes a trigger controlled unit (when you trigger your planer the vac turns on). check out this company for some great dust collection info www.oneida-air.com....

Cool. Hey, next time I get down to CR (which won't be soon, unfortunately) I'd love to see your shop, or get together for a surf. My wife spent a couple months down there once, and I have been there but would love to see more of the country. We may even retire there some year...
Swaylocks is getting truly world-wide these days.
Pura Vida!!
K

Nice setup you've built.

With a 4 HP 220V dust collector, you have all the suction you'll ever need. After all, it was doing the job for a medium sized factory, no? That's a serious unit.

I would strongly suggest some vents in the door to let air in, maybe just a screened door. As one 4 HP dust collector ( http://www.grizzly.com/products/item.cfm?itemnumber=G9958 ) will pull ~ 3600 cu ft per minute ( around 120 cu meters/minute) or be capable of changing all the air in your shaping room about 2-3 times per minute. I kinda doubt you will need to bother with one of the Clark hoses, just a big dust pickup or intake along the bottom of one wall, ideally the wall shown in your last photo that's more or less furthest away from the door. You will probably want to use something like 6" or larger hose or piping to the dust collector itself, maybe ducting as is used in air conditioning systems, with that, as otherwise air velocity in your hose/tube/pipe ( divide volume per minute by the cross-sectional area of your hose or pipe) is gonna be way up there and mebbe cause some problems, maybe some erosion of any corners in the tubes. Likewise, the room you put the collector/vac itself in is gonna need some way to get all that air out, perhaps directly outside through a good sized opening - call it 3' square at least.

Let's see - rough calculations - 6" piping, figure 3000 cu ft/min for the dust collector, cross sectional area is 1/16 x pi square feet or roughly 0.2, 1/0.2 is 5, times 3000, call it 15000 ft/minute or ~180 MPH ( 300 KPH ) through the tubing. Yeehaw, that's much too fast - it'll suck your planer, blank, friends, pets and everything else through the tube, more likely collapse the tube instead unless it's made out of some pretty serious metal. Dust going through at that speed will sandblast through PVC in an amazingly short time at the corners and such.

Okay, make that 12" square ducting or the equivalent, that will knock the speed down to something more reasonable. You can probably make some very good square ducting out of plywood, half inch or so thick to deal with the vaccum pressure. After all, this was probably originally servicing a half dozen good sized machines with 4-6" lines off them, you need to have something with similar area to that setup.

You will probably want to make something like a cyclone dust collector inline. Maybe something like an eight-sided box of plywood, bottom of triangular pieces so it can be kinda conical downwards? ? If I may suggest, PlusOneShaper is the guy with a system on that scale ( which he designed) , and his system is very nicely thought out - see http://www.swaylocks.com/cgi-bin/discussion/archive.cgi/read/53331 for the description of it and an incredibly crude sketch of his setup that might give you a few ideas. Maybe he'll come in on this, as this is way, way more than the shop-vac or small dust collection systems the rest of us use.

Hope that's of use

doc..................

naw , that's ( ~3600 cu ft/min ) what the 4HP Grizzly is rated at ( http://images.grizzly.com/grizzlycom/specsheets/G9958.pdf? ) instead of a hypothetical ideal based on 4 horsepower moving that kind of mass per minute, my figgerin' is using that minus a factor for age and wear on this machine and to make the back-of-the-envelope calculations easy, but even with 30% volume/velocity losses due to friction, etc, you're talking about air velocity capable of handling swarf from a healthy metal lathe and some pretty serious erosion at corners/bends of whatever ductwork the air is going through. Call it 4x or more of what the dust collector was designed to do. And at that kind of vaccum draw, might be some ugly things happening at the fan/impeller. If, say, a shirt or something got loose, blocked the intake or the duct all of a sudden, then standard light PVC tubing as I have seen and used in Panama could well squish.

Now, my dust collection setup here, based on http://www.grizzly.com/products/item.cfm?itemnumber=G8027 with a rated draw of 500 CFM, long leaky 4" corrugated plastic hoses and the accompanying friction loss, it's still capable of keeping up with any tool I have in my workshop, including a 15" thickness planer going full blast on green wood. Six-seven times that? Hoobaby. It can be used, but it's a whole different kind of setup from the small stuff most of us use.

Hey Cabeto, like Doc's calculations suggest, there are a lot of considerations to get a factory to flow air just right. I've run calculations and then set it into practice; what I found is that things like static pressure loss, leaks, and fan impellers internally 'choking' or stalling are all going to affect your systems. Yes, systems. At our factory we have five systems and in the last year or so, I feel we finally have things working quite well.
1. Shaping room dust collection. We have two shaping rooms back-to-back and we have a Grizzly 2 horse/dual bag collector with a cyclone separator lid the fits over a trash can. This can is in-line between the planer and the dust collector. The collector has a sensor that turns the blower on whenever a planer is used and stays on for 4 seconds after planer shutdown to clear the pipes (we use 4 inch pipe from the collector to the split at the rooms followed by a 2-1/2 inch section to the 1-1/4 inch flex section to each planer.). The trash can catches about 95 percent of the shaping debris. A 33-gal can will allow about 8 boards per load. This includes the hand-shaping residue gathered off the floor. A note on floor pick-up: while working with Clark in designing the new planer/vacuum system a philosopy for dust control developed. This was to ELIMINATE sweeping of dust; that is, forget the floor sweep/blast gates; instead detach the flex hose from the planer and attach a floor vacuum attachment. Vast improvement over the broom and floor pick-up.
2. Shaping room ventilation. Because of friction of the tools, body heat, shaping lamps, and the potential release of airborne TDI, it is a good idea that your shaping room be ventilated. I found that a low level of mass-flow-rate is all you need (200 -500 cfm). We use a 10 inch duct feeding through our air conditioner to the two shaping rooms. This is nice; barely perceptible and allows the air to hang long enough to reap the benefit of being air-conditioned.
3. Sanding room ventilation/dust collection. Of all the rooms this one has the most movement, dust is being controlled as well as heat. As Doc described (I really like his sketches, in spite of what he says...) we had a giant cyclone separator built with a funnel section collection at the base. It is 48 inches in diameter, 5 feet tall and operates on negative pressure. The exhaust vents out vertically to the roof and there is NO tell-tale powder around the vent. We have a 15-inch (!) squirrel cage rotor with a 1.5 horse (only!), 220V single phase motor. Note: I went through several months of changing pulley ratios between the motor and the blower and even a couple of motor changes (my engineering calcs were not enough) before I got rid of over-heating of the motor while still getting enough velocity to allow a sander to go full bore. My optimization paid off, literally. Our power bill went from an all-time high of over $350/month to less than $200. Stoked on that one; moral of the story- feel your motor for heating. Since then, I've done similar for our giant compressor and other systems. Calculations may not reflect some of the unique dynamics of a room. We have a 20-inch(ish) square hole in the entrance end of the room and use a "one-wall" system of flow. Our sander loves it.
4. Airbrush room. I designed our airbrush room to flow very lightly through a half (Dutch) door at the entrance to a 6-inch pipe at the other end which is tapped into the system of the Sanding room next door. Tap is located between the Cyclone Can and the !5-inch impeller (negative pressure). Our airbrush room is indoors so we needed to come up with an air control method. As many of you know, airbrush dust can wreck your production. You barely feel any air movement while painting. Downside to the design is that the big blower must run the entire sanding room to get the airbrush room ventilated. (we had a restriction of only one hole in the cieling in that area of our footprint; hence the combo).
5. Lam room. This has a simillar blower (negative pressure) to the sanding room. Again, it took a while to get the motors/blowers to hum "just right". Now, they run killer. We have two cirular duct pipes that split down to adjacent corners at the floor. Resin fumes are a bit more dense that air so they slowly fall to the floor. The longer of the two pipes is 12-inch while the shorter is 10-inch. This is to get equal draw in spite of static pressure losses.

Our office is also tied into the AC of our shaping rooms, and one of my future projects will be to make these seperate so we have better climate control. Another project will be to have vacuum cleaner attachments that are permanently dedicated to zones and tapped into the big blower. Foam dust is EVERYWHERE even in the Lam room from dusting-off blanks. So, there are a lot of details- maybe photos if someone could guide me; I just got a digi-cam. I know, I know, the Archives. Seems like there are 10 ways to do it and some are obsolete. I have a couple of photos of the lam room already I think. Anyways, hope this helps since this stuff is applicable to a boardbuilder of ANY scale. Comfort and Safety are good things.... Keep the good ideas coming!

Hey, Cabeto, great to see somebody else showing us stuff... the sketches make it so much easier to understand.

If you can stick with 220, I would, the motor runs cooler and better. As I found out just before frying a table saw a few years ago. Over about 1 HP motor size, I try to have everything in my workshop running on 220 rather than 110.

For the Ys and such, well, the blast gates are cheap and they would let you tune your suction just right. I think the piping arrangement you have will work fine, though if there isn't an inline cyclone arrangement I'd put one in to make dealing with bulk dust easier in your planer and general vac line. And besides which, you can set up a 'sanding wall' and so forth using blast gates and Ys to make it happen, kinda like valves running plumbing.

I think you're going to have a really sweet setup, something the rest of us are going to envy.

best

doc...........

Okay here goes, my first image. I have Doc to thank (or blame, ha ha!) for this one....
I have a crummy photo of our lam room.

Points of Interest

OVEN. the big silver thermal blanket is rolled-down, covering our digitally-controlled oven. Great to kick off slow lams, quickly dry airbrushes/dings, and cure boards (esp. EPOXY). Nice to stand next to in the winter...
CLOTH DISPENSER. the bolts of cloth are hung in a rack which in turn runs/pivots on a track attached to the ceiling. Allows us to keep each area active for the given footprint.
RECOVERY TRAYS. I can't emphasize the utility of these simple things. Been around since the 50's or 60's. It will work for the home-builder as well. Pour ALL your resin and saturate an entire rail; then scoop the resin back into your bucket and do the other side; it's a cakewalk... floors stay clean AND you use less resin. We routinely get 100+ boards out of a 55-Gal drum. That's for boards of all sizes...
MICROWAVE. we use this to control the viscosity of the resin. Especially good for Epoxy on those winter mornings... (No food goes in this one!)
CENTER CONSOLE. right in the middle of the room we have a table that has air piped into it, so we can operate our airtools without interference. There are 4 chucks at the corners; can't really see it too well. Very handy for the lap preps
VENTILATION DUCTS. the reason I tried to post this weak image. At the right side of the Oven you can see the 12-inch duct pipe which picks up resin fumes that fall to the floor. The other duct and the blower are off camera. Ventilation works very well; we still use respirators though....

I can get more/better photos as soon as I have more time, there is a lot of cool set-up stuff to check out...

With shop vacs and fine dust, it''s all in the filters you use.. You can get fine dust ( hepa ) filters for a lot of the better ones, and for instance Porter Cable and others have vac setups meant to deal with the fine dusts made by sanding sheetrock compound and a that sort of thing. I'd actually suggest the Porter Cable to you, as it has an electric outlet on the machine that you could run your planer from and trigger the vac, far better than doing the Stairmaster every time. I think at least one of the Feins has this feature too, though not the < $150 model I use as my household vaccuum cleaner.

Will a shop vac have enough zip to do it? Sure will, though I'd go with one of the metal-bodied types that are a little more industrial, and they are available used. Line it with an appropriate-sized trash bag if you can, and use a weight or some bent coathanger wires to make something that'll keep the bag from covering the filter and clogging the whole mishmosh. A buddy of mine uses an old industrial-grade metal shop vac as the dust collector for a router table, and it works fine in that rather difficult application .

Shop-vac horsepower is kinda like router horsepower..I have no idea how or where they get the horsepower numbers but I tend to doubt all of them, the amperage ratings of the motors are a much more reliable comparison. Cubic feet per minute and inches of water they will draw as vaccum are numbers you can actually work with and you can find those numbers for the better vacs.

Let's see- rather than running a lot of tubing, piping and so on, I'd just tuck the vac in a corner of the room, out of your way, easy to turn on and off, ceiling mounted 2" PVC piping and then neck down to something like one of the Clark hoses and on the other end use 2 1/4" shop vac hose to the vac. Use standard shop-vac type or household type brushes and tubes for the rest of the cleanup. Noise would no doubt be a consideration, but the better shop-vacs ( notably the Feins and Milwaukees and the metal bodied types) ae a lot quieter than the cheapies and definitely quieter than your planer, call them a little louder than a household vaccuum cleaner.

Gravity would help with the other setup, but I'd go with nothing bigger than 3" PVC and probably 2' would be the way to go all the way. Friction loss would be the bummer there, PVC pipe is the way to go 'cos the corrugated tubing is bad that way.

They make a rig for inline cyclone-type dust collection, instead of the trash can rig used with the bigger dust collectors it uses a 5 gallon bucket, but I have to say they are kinda silly.

Anyhow, that's my take on it.... hope that's of use

doc..........

1. I may have created a monster! Good!
2. I remember when I was a kid, banging stuff together. And now and then I'd get a chance to see a real workshop; "Aha, THIS is how the grown-ups do it"

Very nice! The little sounds you hear, like mebbe mice or something running around , is me borrowing ideas that'll adapt nicely to my mostly woodworking, some metalworking, some composites shop.

thanks, man. Slick setup, no doubt about it.

doc.......................

Ah, good thinking with the ext cord and strip setup, or just run the cord up and plug/unplug.

Around here, I have a good used tool shop, kind of a spinoff from one of the larger local tool suppliers and their repair shop. Which, being a bottom feeder, I visit regularly. And I see at least a couple of used smaller dust collectors or bigger shop-vacs in there all the time. Likewise yard sales, you often see good stuff going cheap, look at the manufacturer's nameplate for the amp rating. My good friend Michael the Big Greek scored one of the stainless steel bodied wet-dry shop vacs for $10 at one, very handy being as he runs a fish market. If the thing fires up and doesn't make any dead bearings grinding noises, it's generally fine. They are definitely out there : coulda bought two heavy duty metal jobs at one yard sale last spring for $25 each. And that was the one day last year that I went 'sailing'. In one small town.......

It'd be good if you looked around at prices and ratings ( Amazon's tool prices are a good indicator ) so you know if something is a good deal used or not. Sometimes people want to get more than they paid new, don't ask me why.

Filters and fine dust filters for older machines you can fake with stuff like landscape fabric and plastic meshes and foam and a little glue and tape if they are not easily available at the corner hardware store. Might in some cases be better than the store-bought anyhow. If you can blow smoke through the fabric or foam, it's good stuff and won't restrict your air too much, if flour or talcum won't go through it ( dump a little on the fabric and shake it a little) it'll handle small dust particles.

Do look for a vac that uses the bigger diameter (~ 2") hose, as it'll work with the 2" piping: it's designed and built to deal with the appropriate volume of air per minute for 2" lines. The other nice thing about the PVC is it's cheaper than corrugated lines, per foot, and scrap piping works fine if you don't have too many couplings in it.

hope that's of use

doc.............

Hey Cabeto - here's a thought for your overpowered system. Kill 2 birds with one stone; tame it down by running it through an air scrubber/charcoal filter. See some thoughts here:
http://www.swaylocks.com/forum/gforum.cgi?post=149922;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;forum_view=forum_view_collapsed;;page=unread#unread

I had to look through a lot of Herb's posts before I could find this. How many posts does Herb have anyway?!

He may have some other photos but this is one I found showing his 30 gallon dry/vac conversion.

Not sure about he rigs his hoses, etc.

This was posted a little over 3 years ago.

http://www.swaylocks.com/resources/Detailed/240.html