I Made a Centrifugal Dust Separator to Upgrade My Cheapo Dust Collector

in stage one of integrating dust collection into my shop i ran a bunch of piping and connected all of my dust creating machines to my dust collecting machine reginald now that's all done and it's time for stage two in the last video i said stage two would be upgrading the dust collector itself this cheapo harbor freight unit here by adding dust separation in the form of a cyclone or a theme baffle but i'm not going to be doing either one of those instead i'm going to be making a centrifugal dust separator an idea that was directly ripped from this this is a harvey dust processor and now this video is not sponsored by or affiliated with harvey woodworking in any way shape or form it's a fairly high end and very innovative dust collector with a lot of interesting features but the one i'm most interested in is how it handles dust separation because it uses what harvey calls the gyro air dust separation process and here's how it works here's a 2d drawing of a tube a terrible one now the gyro air dust separation process is split up into two stages here the first stage is what harvey calls the double cone separator this is for separating out heavier particles of dust the airstream the dusty airstream comes in from this side and the airstream passes over this first cone here and then down into the mouth of the second cone and the idea is the airstream can make this bend but the heavier particles of dust won't be able to and they'll be forced around the outside of this cone here and drop down into this first bucket that's the first stage the second stage is over here this is the centripetal stage of the process here the airstream will pass into here and into these very poorly drawn axial fins which will spin up the airflow and using centrifugal separation the fine particles of dust that were not separated out from the first stage will be spun up flung to the outside of the tube and then separated down into this bucket right here and the remaining very clean now airstream will pass down through these fins and into the exit of the tube where it will then pass into a filter where any of the remaining dust particles that were not separated out by this process will be caught by the filters i think this idea is super clever and harvey claims that it's significantly more efficient than your typical cyclonic dust separator so what i want to do is try to make my own and i'm going to make it in this clear acrylic tube so if it works we can watch the dust separation magic happen join me i'm going to start out by making these inner cone pieces here and since they're cylindrical that means lathe work so i'm going to start out by gluing together a buck to be turned down on the lathe and by the way my choice of materials for this project is going to be almost entirely three-quarter inch baltic birch plywood i drill a hole in the center of each one of these little squares here so as i stack them up i can center them with a dowel one so they can be centered and not slide around as i stack them up with glue but also so i can use the dowel as a mandrel to turn these on the lathe with now the lathe blanks for the inner cones are glued up i'm going to make the lathe blanks for the outer cones which will be the same thing but different so definitionally not the same thing [Music] just like the other lathe blanks i'm going to be gluing these up centered on a dow this dowel will be turned away later because this center will not be here anymore but it makes glue up a lot easier and it allows everything to be nice and centered these hilariously massive turning blades are just about ready to be turned down on the lathe but before i do that i'm going to trim off the excess corners on the band saw anybody in the mood for kebab now up until a few days ago i did not have a set of proper lathe turning tools so i went on amazon and i bought a set of carbide inserts for lathe turning tools for about 20 bucks and i made my own set here they are they're not very good they're also tiny i made them pin turning size because i made them using only the materials i had on hand and i didn't have very much but they'll do the job for now now let's get to turning down these big chunks of plywood on the lake well it didn't take me long to figure out this ain't gonna work turning down baltic birch on the lathe is awful no fun at all it's glacially slow and it builds up a lot of heat some of which actually burn my hand so instead of continuing to turn down this horrible to turn baltic birch plywood blank i'm going to make a new life blank a couple of new lathe blanks out of a much easier to turn material and the new lathe blanks are going to be made out of laminated pine because that's what i had on hand this is leftover scrap from a failed workbench top i made last year now the outer cone pieces these large pucks right here are still going to be made out of baltic birch because frankly i didn't have enough laminated pine to make these two but there's a lot less material to remove from these so hopefully i can manage those on the lathe unlike these inner cone pieces where i had a ton of material to remove [Applause] since that piece exploded i glued up a new lathe blank for this kind of made out of red oak i was having a lot of trouble carving out the inside of this cone here because i was working against oak in grain with my dinky little miniature turning tools and they kept getting snagged which would yank my hand which was unpleasant so after this piece removed itself from the lathe i finished coring out the cone at the drill press with a forstner bit which also didn't go incredibly well and then i finished off the rest of it here at the router table with this spiral angry bit and now it's cored out this inside shape isn't quite as refined as i would have liked but it'll do now on to turning down the inner cones [Music] so do and here are all the components of the tube and as you can see the only component that remains that's made of baltic birch is this inlet cone here everything else had to be replaced these inner cones turned out to be way too hard to be turned out of baltic birch so they're now laminated pine and this cone exploded so it's now made out of oak and this piece is made out of oak too i originally planned with the baltic birch i was going to turn them based on this dowel that i centered the blank on but before i figured out that this one was going to be way too hard to turn the dowel broke off so that didn't work so what i did for these laminated pine inner cone pieces is for this one i drilled a hole through the center of it and epoxied an aluminum rod in there and turned this cone on that this cone i drilled a hole through it and i screwed in this little piece of threaded rod and then i turned this cone on this piece of threaded rod so that way when i was done turning it i could unscrew this piece of threaded rod and just continue on and now i just have the aluminum rod from this one shoved into the front of this one it's not epoxy in place yet but it will be soonly once i figure out the distances here this cone right here needs a set of fins wrapping around it to direct the airflow into a swirling pattern hence the centripetal part of this whole dust separation tube thing but how do i make these fins they're rather complex parts they're compound curves not only do they have to curve to direct the airflow but they have to wrap around this cone inside the tube now the most obvious answer of how to make these fins is 3d print them but i don't have a 3d printer so i've been thinking about this for several days now and i think i've come up with an idea of how to make these fins so to find out if my idea pans out follow along with me and we'll see if this works foreign well this isn't going to work and let me explain to you why these little rods sticking out of here that i glued in and roughly the shape of a fin are bamboo skewers like the kind you'd use for food and i thought that i could glue in all of these skewers and then bridge the gap with something to complete the shape of a fin but here are the two attempts i tried this one i wrapped the skewers in aluminum foil tape like the kind you'd use on ductwork and then i covered that in bondo and sanded it roughly smooth the results are mediocre and sanding in these gaps was a heck of a lot of work and painful in my hands so that's not going to work and the second attempt here i wrapped the skewers in masking tape and on the front edge to get a smoother surface i put some poster board up here and then filled it with epoxy but you can very clearly see why that didn't work because epoxy is liquid and this stuff wraps around a cylinder so it didn't fill up here and on the edges it was overflowing not to mention it was a heck of a mess so this isn't going to work either so what i'm going to do now is cut off all of these little bamboo skewers and start over with a totally different attempt this will be mildly fun and just like that all of my hard work is undone now i went on patreon and asked my supporters if they had any suggestions on how i could complete these fins and they gave me a lot of great ideas but the one i ended up going with was from a guy named sam he suggested i use acrylic stick it in a toaster oven for a bit get it all melty and then bend it to shape and that's what i've done here and that's the approach i'm going to go with so now follow along and i'll show you how i got to this in result here i'll have to do it seven more times after much trial and error i found a good rough shape for the start of the fins and transferred that shape to a small piece of plywood to use as a template then i can tape that plywood template to a piece of acrylic rough cut the shape at the bandsaw [Music] and finish the shaping at the router table with a flush trim bit [Music] with the plywood template removed it's time to plop the acrylic fin shape in this gross toaster oven for about five minutes once the fin is all melty and bendy i can bend it to shape using one of my previous fin attempts as a bending form if you're wondering what the original bending form was i used that failed epoxy filled fin attempt that you saw earlier as the original bending form to attach the finished bent fin in place i'm just using epoxy with some hot glue to hold the fin in place while the epoxy hardens then after a lengthy session of repetitive movements i have this beautiful monstrosity now all i have to do is wait for the epoxy to harden overnight now i need to connect these two cones together roughly like this this one's going to be suspended in the middle of the tube so to connect these i'm going to use splines which in the airflow will act like straight fins so i need to cut four slots in the mouth of this cone and four slots around the edge of this cone so to do that on the table saw i've stuck this square piece of wood onto the rod that this cone is mounted on that is the same width as the diameter of this cone and i can use it on the table saw as a square collet block for the slots in the outer cone i just marked approximately where they should go and then cut them on the sled now to make the connecting splines [Music] and that's going to go together a little something like this here none of this is glued up right now it's just a dry fit to see how everything goes together and to keep this rod in the middle of this cone here i've cut a little circular piece of wood with a hole in it to keep it in the middle and yes it's positioned over my router table because this rod sticks out below the bottom that's where the turbine looking piece is going to connect to now to get brave enough to glue this all up and make it all permanent and after the glue is dried on these fins the rod from this fits into the front end of this cone and that's how they'll go into the tube and as you may have noticed i gave this one a superficial coat of white paint around the offending areas now i would epoxy this rod into the front of this cone here but if something goes wrong with these fins or if i have to remake this whole piece entirely i want these two to be separatable so i've just added some masking tape to increase the width of this rod so it'll be a friction fit between the two so they'll stay together especially in the two but if i need to pull them apart i will be able to and that's it now this whole piece should just slide right into this clear acrylic tube with these fins providing a good amount of resistance enough to keep it from just falling straight through something like that oh no how do we abort this don't let the crack spread i don't know what to do oh that was a big one oh as you could have guessed by me hammering this piece into place it was too big for the two not by much but it was too big for the tube so it was creating outward pressure pushing out of the tube and when i went to drill the hole to secure it in place i created a stress relief point and this crack was formed now this tube was hard to find and it was fairly expensive this acrylic tube cost me over 100 so i'm not going to be replacing it i'm just going to work with the mistake that i made and work with this crack there needs to be a dust relief port put in right about here so i'm just going to use the crack position as the place for that dust relief port and work with it [Music] uh now to make a couple mounts slash dust shoots to hold the tube in place foreign so [Applause] ah [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hey [Applause] [Music] uh the tube is all done i've got the holes cut in it for the dust to fall out of it and it's secured to this stand that i've created the hole that i cut in the bottom of the tube on this side since this double cone separator relies mostly on gravity it's full width this hole that i cut over here is only half width because this part of the separation relies on centripetal force i cut the hole at half width i don't know if that's the right way to do it it just seemed like the right thing to do and i blended this hole in with the existing crack that i created earlier and whatever crack isn't part of this hole i just covered up with packing tape it'll seal it up and i don't need to be a structural patch so that'll work just fine now dimensions and sizing the inlet of the cone is five inches this is just a five inch standard size dust collection fitting that i cut down on the bandsaw and shoved into the end of this code i chose that because the outlet on my dust collector is also five inches so i can just hook it up with a hose to the front of the dust separator everything else the diameter of the inner cones and the inner diameter of the two outer cones is four inches i chose four inches because i guessed and if that doesn't sound very scientific it's because it isn't initially i figured out the size of the inner diameter mathematically and i thought a good target to go to would be to have the cross-sectional surface area of this inner circle equal to the cross-sectional surface area of this outer ring that way the air traveling around the inner cones and inside the outer cones had the same amount of space to travel it however the diameter where those two surface areas are equivalent was five and a half inches and that didn't look right the inner tube being five and a half inches was fine but the inner cones having that big of a diameter it didn't look right it looked like it would fill up most of the tube this tube is only eight inches wide and having that slim of an outer ring for the air to travel around those inner cones it just didn't look right so i downsized it again to five inches and the cones still look too big so i downsized it once more and finally to four inches so i can use standard size dust collection fittings on the inside and i can't go any lower than that because the inlet on my dust collector is four inches so i didn't want to create too much of a bottleneck by having a smaller than four inch outlet now i know that this dust separation tube is going to create a little bit of a bottleneck in my dust collection system because despite the inlet of my dust collector having the same diameter as the outlet of this tube the air has to go through an obstacle course before it gets to this outlet so there's going to be some restriction involved ideally i would have two of these dust separation chambers sitting side by side on this board but i don't even know if this one's going to work yet so before i go to all the trouble of making a second one i've just mounted this one in the middle of this piece of plywood and left enough room on this piece of plywood to mount two side by side if i ever decide to make a second one of these in the future i have the space and i have the option but now it's time to finish this one and the next step is to make a stand for this base one that holds some dust bins and this [Music] well i just hit the record button twice and now this got recorded but i just cut a bunch of tongues on the end of these boards with this table saw sled set up just pretend that blade's spinning and this isn't already cut and then immediately after failing to turn the camera on i put it right in the way [Music] i really like how this stand came out i don't know what this style of construction is called i've never made anything like this before but i like it so i'm going to make the dust bin in the filter box in the same style starting with the dust bin it's going to sit right here where i am as i didn't show you earlier i'm making the frame rails out of ordinary construction lumber that i milled down [Applause] [Music] myself [Music] [Applause] the dry fed up of this looks pretty good except for this corner right here this is a slot to accept a sheet of plywood for the bottom of this box and that groove needs to extend to the corner of this so i'm going to do that at the router table [Music] [Applause] that's more like it i've got the dustbin frame dry fit together and it's looking pretty good it's just a box but it's looking pretty good except i have four more frame rails to make because this dust bin is going to be divided into two parts right about here so i need to make a frame rail for here the bottom here and the top so i'm gonna do that now [Music] whoops i made these pieces way too short because i'm an idiot time to make two more i made two new pieces off camera and they're still too short i accidentally set the stop block on my miter saw station a half inch too short without realizing it so i have to make two more now [Music] that's better i haven't managed to make it the right size this time now i just need to cut some mortises in this top rail here to accept the tenons on the end of this piece [Music] the dustbin frame is now fully done and fully dry fit together i went to the extra effort of cutting these little strips in the middle to hold the plywood partition that separates the two halves of the dust bin and if you're wondering why it is split into two halves like this it's because this smaller portion is for the fine particles of the dust that are separated out by the centrifugal part of the separator and this larger portion is for the heavier particles of dust that are separated out by the double cone thingy at the beginning as to why they're sized roughly one-third and two-thirds of the dust bin i'm just copying how the harvey dust processor is set up that's how its dust bin is set up so why not copy it they know what they're doing i'm just a guessing now it's time to glue this frame together i wish no the first thing i have to do is cut out all the plywood and glass panels that are going to fill in all these gaps and make this an enclosed box yes that's right i'm putting glass in here it's a dust bin going to see how full it is [Music] [Applause] now to start gluing up the dust bin and i'm only going to be gluing up the bottom for right now because i still have glass panels to cut for the side and make room in the plywood for those glass panels besides this is a very large and complicated glue up so it's best to take it in smaller steps as possible [Music] with the plywood cut down to allow for the width of the glass glass channels cut into the plywood and the glass itself cut it's time to nearly finish the glue up of this dust bin and to glue the glass in place i'm not going to be using silicone i'm going to be using clear construction adhesive dad while the glue dries on the desk bin i'm going to put the finishing touches on this whole dust separator tube shelf thing and get it attached to the stand that it's going to sit on [Laughter] i give the dustbin in the stand a light sanding and a coat of poly last night and now you can see how they're supposed to fit together these two filters from the minnesota mining and manufacturing company 3m are what i'm going to use in my new and improved dust collector and they're just standard furnace filters although they are of the four inch thick variety supposedly each one of these is rated at 1280 cfm max and they're rated at mirv 12. now these will not be as good as a dust collector canister filter for instance the canister filter i was looking at for wind environmental is rated at mir 15. so it's better than merv 12. but each one of those canister filters from wind environmental was 220 dollars these were 60 dollars for both of them so trade-offs and while these will not be as good as a canister filter they'll certainly be better than the bag filter that i have now and there's two of them so now all i have to do is make a box to hold these ah oh look at this my dust collector sprung a leak oh my god turn it off [Applause] [Music] [Music] well i screwed up on this filter box here i sized it wrong i didn't account for the inside dimension of these rails and as a result the filter doesn't fit inside of it which is problematic because it's a filter box moreover i didn't designate a way for the filter to actually get inside the box even if it did fit in here so i could cut away at these frame rails to allow the filter to slide in but since i'm using cheap ish construction lumber i'm just going to remake the whole thing to the proper dimensions this time [Music] that's more like it now the filter actually fits in the filter box what a novel idea now i just need to cut down some plywood and glue this all together it's a box off-camera i sanded this and gave it a coat of poly and now it's a fully enclosed box so where do the filters go [Music] [Applause] now the filter should fit in here a little something like that i'll put some seals in here and i'll put some springs in here to hold the filters against the sides of the box but now it's time to complete this filter box after sanding i have the lid a thin coat of poly to protect it make a little bit more nicer now i can secure it in place by drilling two holes driving in these two hanger bolts into the box lock the lid back in place and keep it there with these two knobs as for sealing the filters against the sides of the box and holding them in place i just use foam weatherstripping around the edge it's not going to be perfect because it's ceiling because the cardboard of these filters but it's going to be better than nothing and to hold them in place i'm just using the cut off from the end of my acrylic tube and it happens to have a crack in the middle of it so i can shrink it down when i want to take it out but when i want to hold them in place i can expand it out realign the crack and it holds the filters perfectly in place i was experimenting with wooden springs and all sorts of other things to hold these filters in place but this random cut off does the job perfectly off camera i put some finishing touches on this whole stand dust bin assembly here starting with the dust bin you'll notice that it's hovering it's because it's attached to the bottom of the top here using two toggle latches one on each side holding the dust bin up in place when i put these toggle latches in place i found out they can't actually reach in far enough to grab a hold of this hook if it was surface mounted to the side of this dust pin here that's why you see this hook that the latch grabs onto weld onto the end of a hinge i put it on the end of the hinge so that when it pulls up on the dust man it can also pull out it can actually grab on to it i screw this rubber band across here just to keep it flush against the box so it doesn't flop down now if i'm honest this works pretty well but this sticks out just a little bit further than i would like and it rubs on the side here i have to hold it in manually it's not a big deal but it's not quite as smooth as i would have liked it to be to seal the top of the dustbin against the bottom of this shelf here i just added foam weatherstripping all the way around and those toggle clamps make sure that that foam weather stripping is firmly pressed in place and inside the stand i added some little strips of wood to act as guide rails so that when i push the dust box in here it goes in roughly the same place every time my lungs are now half full of sawdust because i just disassembled my dust collector to harvest all the good bits off of it just the blower and i cleaned up the area around it now the only thing i have left to do in this whole build really is to make a bracket not just for this to mount on the stand but also my filter box i lied nothing here is permanently set up i didn't make the stands yet i've just got the filter box precariously set up on a sawhorse i've got my blower fan sitting on a toolbox of some sort but everything's all plumbed together in the case of this five inch hose coming out of the blower it's barely plumbed because as it turned out this five inch fitting is just a little bit too big for this hose but i made it work for now and i have everything set up and plumbed in so let's try it out for the first time let's turn this thing on and see if it actually separates dust as intended it could all blow up the first time i turn it on i have no idea hope it doesn't do that because i spent a lot of time working on this and that would make me very sad but this is all an experiment so if it does do that it's okay let's try it out i'm nervous tearing it on all right now let's suck up some dust that's some promising swirling action going on there oh yeah look at that swirl that's incredible oh it looks like a sieve but that's okay i can fix that oh right look at that now i've disconnected the filter box entirely so we can see how well the dust separation is working i'm going to blow a scoop full of dust through this thing and see how much comes out this end here see how much is actually separated core intact all right that's not a good start sucking up dust now that's the result and here's the inside of the dust bin after those tests i can see that there's a little tiny air leak down in that corner but that's all right that's nothing a little silicone can't fix as you can see i did silicone around all the edges already but i missed a couple of spots and that's one of them otherwise all the dust is staying in the dust bin as it should this thing is working way better than i could have hoped for now to finish it it's done i made a proper mount and stand for the blower that just screws to the side of the main base i replaced the outlet hose of the blower because the old one somehow shrank over time and wouldn't go back on when i took it off so i got this new five inch hose to replace it i added this strengthening bar to the top of the stand here because the force of the dust bin pushing up on this piece of plywood was causing it to bow in the middle only in the front and that was causing a little bit of a gap right here so the seal from the dust bin was not making contact with the bottom of this top here and air was rushing out so i added this strengthening brace to keep the plywood flat and to keep that seal pressed tightly in the middle and i added some led strips to the back of the stand to backlight the dust bin when i turn on the dust collector that's why i added glass to the front and the back of the dust bin so i could backlight it because i wanted to it seemed like a fun thing to do unfortunately my filter box here while it looks great for the thumbnail it doesn't actually work the problem is with these household furnace filters that i used i didn't really think they would work but i wanted to try and i proved myself right they don't work there's nothing wrong with the filter medium itself it's this cardboard housing that they're in i couldn't get the thin cardboard to seal against the box with the foam weather stripping that i put in there i didn't really expect that to work and it didn't so i siliconed the filters in place and that still didn't work because these filter pleats are not held into the thin cardboard housing with any sort of sealant or adhesive or anything they're just friction fit in there so after i silicone the filters in place all kinds of sawdust started spilling out between the filter pleats and the thin cardboard housing that they're set in so i just decided to cut my loss and i went online and i ordered a proper dust collector canister filter like i mentioned earlier it's mer 15 rated it'll be high flow it'll be properly sealed sure it was expensive but i know it'll work and it's going to be an excellent filter and a great upgrade for this system and in the meantime until that canister filter arrives i'm just using this cheapo filter bag here essentially a sock stuck on the end of a tube it'll work for now so would i recommend you go out and build one of these for yourself no not at all i tackled this project because it seemed like a large fun challenging project with a lot of problem solving elements and on that it delivered in spades i spent weeks working on this i had a lot of fun made a lot of mistakes and i learned a lot of things but if i just wanted the end result here well i'd go out and buy a harvey dust processor it'd be a lot less effort and i ended up with a much better end result and if i just wanted the dust separator portion of it to add to my existing dust collection system well jet makes a standalone dust separator that they unimaginably call the cyclonic separator and it's essentially the patent infringement avoidance version of the harvey gyro air separation system and by that i mean by that i mean it combines these two stages into one stage it does really look like it's just trying to avoid a patent because it works otherwise pretty much the same way and it's only 150 dollars so if you want to add this sort of dust separation to your existing system go out and buy one of those i chose to build this system because it seemed like a fun thing to do and it was and it works a lot better than i would have ever expected it to this thing works almost exactly like i would imagine the ideal result to work and i'm thrilled with it so anyway thank you for watching i'll see you next time

Channel: Under Dunn

Views: 486,545

Keywords: Harvey, Gyro Air, Centripital, Cyclone, Cyclonic, Sawdust, Harbor Freight, 2HP, Tube, Bullet, Cone, Football, Jet, Turbine

Id: n2OStvRteRE

Length: 38min 20sec (2300 seconds)

Published: Wed May 19 2021