Shop Built Vacuum Kiln

I'm super excited to finally have all the components in to put the vacuum Kiln back together I want to give a shout out to Tom Montgomery at chem Tech scientific for helping me uh get this far and walking me through some of the critical steps and helping me acquire a much more larger and robust uh vacuum pump to hopefully get some better deeper quicker drying times than before so looking forward to putting it back together acquired some crazy looking vacuum connections that I didn't have before so looking forward to seeing how it turns out thank you [Music] what I'm really liking about these vacuum fittings is that there's no wrong orientation like if you're using threaded connections or an npt the you're always hoping that the thread bottoms out in the in the position you want or tightens up in the position you won't wear these the orientation of them is endless plus they look cool look like something that belongs on a spaceship tell you what I'm not too impressed with these clamps the maker of them approach them on Amazon but the maker of them didn't do a whole lot of uh finish work and the edges are very sharp on them looks like they were just lasered out put together I got the pump filled with oil we got the lid ready to go I thought I'd walk you through it we got a regular analog gauge this is just the monitor the beginning of the process to make sure we actually are pulling up a vacuum this is not accurate at all when it gets into the deeper vacuums um are we gonna this Precision gauge will be connected to this probe here and we'll be able to monitor the deeper vacuums with this Precision gauge this is another chemtech product it's got a ball valve sitting right here so that we can release the vacuum if needed this is just for our data and our power we've got a USB port in here we have an eight conductor for our thermocouples and we have power this coupling right here is completely filled with hardened epoxy to create the seal around the cables this little guy right here is just a small little inexpensive controller that is capable of monitoring vacuum pressure the the idea here is that if it gets above 10 tour that it would shut the pump off and the reason for that is this pump cannot operate at higher pressure needs to operate lower pressures it can only operate at high presses for a short period of time so anything above 10 tour it begins to lose a little bit of oil and over time you'll burn your pump out so this is going to keep us for a little bit of a fail safe and just like I said I just filled it up with oil so I'm gonna let it sit overnight make sure we don't have any leaks in the morning and give it a shot all right about to test this thing out we got all plumbed up sealed up just drop pump should be getting quieter as it gets lower let's see what happens foreign [Music] so awesome excited now let's see how low can we go I got two pieces of Sinker Cypress here there's still plenty of saturation still left in it to do some testing we're right around 20 on the uh on the moisture content so we're gonna put our our heating blanket in we've got our thermocouple set up we even got a camera in there see if it'll it'll survive the vacuum and uh I'm excited let's see what happens I just got it closed up we got our moisture meter up ran to the outside sitting at 570 torr 100 degrees on the thermocouple zero on the controller because you're not pulling a vacuum yet let's get started so far so good way below 10 tour right sitting at 5.3 right now we got 110 degrees on the on the heating blanket you can see on the video you can actually see some of the water coming out of the water bottle that I left in there so looking good I just got invited to a crawfish ball some priorities of priorities I'll have to pick back up on it tomorrow but I'm gonna let it run overnight hopefully we'll see some significant change in the multimeter I mean in the uh moisture meter [Music] well I'm well into my my second attempt here and things are going good so far this time I have a larger piece of wood loaded in it's the copy of this cross-section of a stump these are going to be the base of a large conference table so I got one of these actually loaded in there right now this time I use this smaller uh less expensive pump to start the process so this pump is not capable of pulling down deep vacuums however it will get me to the point where the larger pump is not having to do all of the work so I set it on this little Port first I let it start running and it got down to about 100 torr and we can go any deep deeper from that so let it hang out there for a little bit pull whatever air and moisture I put out of the chamber and then shut it off tapped it off and ran the larger pump until it achieved the low 10 torque we're hanging out about mid eight tour which I'm not really proud of I've seen it I've seen this chamber sealed off better than this and worked better than this in the in the first run so I'm kind of gonna look into that a little bit more after this run but I should be getting numbers a little bit lower than eight torque but nevertheless it is working the exciting thing is is that I can watch the moisture levels and see them come down the oil is staying much cleaner this time that than the first time now that the chamber is clean so I'm just monitoring it all keeping an eye on it looks like it looks good so far we're seeing 6.7 tour right now that's kind of low up it's been fluctuating between six and and nine as it off gases the uh temperatures hanging around around 60 degrees this started off at 73. so yeah we've lost 13. degrees already just kind of keep an eye on that make sure we're not freezing our wood during the evaporation process the exciting thing though is that this started off around 18 now we're at 16.1 so it is dropping steady steadily dropping and uh we'll see what it winds up it's been about three hours so far so got a little ways to go still but but it's working [Music] the new pump's doing a lot better this go around it's staying much cooler hanging out around 100 degrees the uh the oil is still collecting a little bit of moisture what's happening is here in south Louisiana we have a high moisture content I'm sitting around 90 90 humidity right now so that doesn't leave a whole lot of room for the moisture that's trying to be removed from from the saturation of the wood it's winding up it's just it's almost like it's raining inside the tank the oil tank as that moisture Wicks through there so the the oil is picking up quite a bit of it which tells me I need to do a little bit better job of capturing that oil right now it's sitting on the base of this this this all sump and what I'm doing every now and is I'm opening up this Tech talk and just draining it out and then topping it back off as the process continues that seems to be working right now but I think what I can do later on is is have a larger Reservoir sitting on the side with a little bit of a water trap to where I can I can capture that water and deal with it for a longer period of time and not have to keep babysitting it but right now I'm very pleased like I said the moisture content in the wood is dropping I'm able to see that on the meter so so far so good foreign [Music] foreign [Music] the chamber 12 hours and going in at some over 30 percent moisture content it's coming out at six and a half you can tell by the sheer weight of this thing it's so much lighter than it was before I couldn't handle it by hand before now I'm able to move it around pretty easily overall it worked I'm I'm really excited about that I can see by just looking in here I got a little bit of moisture that's being reintroduced inside the Chamber from the front seal so I got some work to do there looking forward to automating some of the processes that I was having to do by hand got a little bit of checking but that's to be expected for this size piece of wood like I said overall it worked I'm excited

Channel: Brice Quibodeaux

Views: 17,024

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Id: zwRIzK6iJ04

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2023