Shop cyclone

[rick]

Saw this post:

I currently just hook up to a vac ... has anyone made such a cyclone in UK ,, be interested what parts you found suitable.

[John Rumm]

The one I did:

Some of Andy's:

[rick]

notice you guys went to bother of shaping the inlet to match curve .. whereas in link I posted the guy just stuck the pipe in. Assume the angle entrywould get cyclonic action working better.

Now where can I find air duct in that size :-)

[Harry Bloomfield]

rick presented the following explanation :

Within reason, you can make them as big or small as you like, so long as there is a cyclone type rotation and a drop in air flow in the container it will work very effectively.

The one in the vid seemed like a lot of messing about to clamp the two together. A large bucket, with a rough wooden lid, with the two pipes entering via the lid works as well. Just put a couple of bricks on the lid to form a seal - the vacuum will do the rest of the clamping.

[John Rumm]

The reality is that you can get something that catches 95% of the dust very easily - just an "interceptor" container that causes the air to change direction once will dump most of the particulates out of it. Its when you want the cyclone to be the *only* filtration stage that it gets much more important to get the design spot on.

What 4"?

Axminster, Rutlands, or any DIY shop if you don't mind doing some of the work with 110mm soil pipe and fittings.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Aldi (and I think Lidl too) were selling a large metal drum pre-filter for fire ash, and they were going very cheap after a while. I had literally sack loads of sawdust to suck out from under a floor (it used to be the loft insulation before another floor was added). The drum was not designed to be a cyclone, but with a relatively simple mod to make the air spin, and accelerate the outlet to spin out the dust, it worked fantastically. Almost nothing went through into the vacuum cleaner, and the metal drum held much more than a vacuum cleaner.

There was also another version of the ash filter which had a vacuum cleaner attached to the lid, but I didn't look at that one.

[Alan Braggins]

I've got one of the Aldi drums, and had got as far as vaguely wondering about trying to make it cyclonic. Any recommendations?

[Andrew Gabriel]

Remove the HEPA filter.

You want an elbow to attach to the inlet on the inside of the drum. There's very little pipe coming in to the drum, but I found a suitable fitting in my stock which just about fitted. I think it's probably BES item 11146:

Angle the outlet of this circumfrentially, to generate a cyclone spinning motion in the drum. This all that's needed to a first approimation, and it works well with sawdust. Drum will now hold much more dust as the incoming air stream does not stir up the settled dust until the drum is almost full, and it is being very much more effective at filtering the dust out of the airflow.

For coupling up a vacumm cleaner, I found a short length of 32mm plastic waste pipe could be pushed in the rubber seal on the drum outlet (might need a thin smear of liquid soap to get it in first few times as it's very tight), and this couples well with a Dyson DC07 hose cuff.

Further improvements are: Create a narrowing of the end of the outlet pipe inside the drum - this generates a higher acceleration of the spinning air before it exits the drum and will throw out even finer dust. A suitable 32mm-21mm pipe reducer might work, but they are usually fitting reducers so you would need a 32mm coupler too. Move the outlet to the centre of the lid (I haven't done this yet). Move the inlet to be a tangential connection at the top of the side of the drum.

If you do all this, you aren't actually benefitting from having bought a drum which was almost a cyclone to start with rather thanb building one from a dustbin or similar. However, just the pipe elbow mod is very effective, and possibly the limit of what's really worth doing with this ash attachment.

[sm_jamieson]

How do these baffle type cyclones perform compared to the conical ones with no baffle (just an open cone) ? Simon.

[John Rumm]

They prevent any direct capture of the incoming stream by the exhaust - and so are somewhat better. How much I don't have figures for. However you may find your answers here:

(Bill later went on to start Clear Vue Cyclones, and those designs include the baffle, so I expect his research suggested it was worthwhile).

[rick]

How long ago ? .... is it too long to expect to find one in a store ?

[Andrew Gabriel]

Aldi - it was a month or more ago. Some of the stores still had the odd one left a couple of weeks ago.

I rarely go in to Lidl (not so convenient), but I did see them in there after Aldi had mostly sold out.

The drums alone were orignally £20, reduced to £10 when I bought one.

[David]

Just a thought - if you want a really big one how about an old oil drum? I have one I intended to use as an incinerator so I didn't get the lid, but.....

......emptying it might get to be a problem.

Interesting tip about removing the filter from the ash catcher. I have an old wet and dry which might combine with the ash catcher (which I bought a year or so on offer) to form a two stage ash or sawdust trap.

Cheers

Dave R

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Bloody'ell, I've got one of those and it never occurred to me to make it cyclonic. I'd just picked it up a couple of years ago as a 'useful sometime' tool as too cheap to ignore. The fire is very rarely lit, so it's never actually been used for its original purpose at all.

[damduck-egg]

I bought one for my mother. It was a failure and ash came flying out the air outlet. Should have taken it back to Lidl but it was 150 miles away from where I bought it and it wasn't practical to bring it back. Read a few reviews and found it was a common failure. The seal of the filter to where the motor was located wasn't made very well so fine ash bypassed the filter and was sucked through the gap.

G.Harman

[Jon Fairbairn]

And mine:

[Andrew Gabriel]

Assuming the drum and filter work same way in that version, used as intended with the filter, I can't imagine it would have worked at all well. It was really silly not to design it as a cyclone in the first place - it's so nearly there.

[Andy Dingley]

I should probably update that page...

Aldi fireplace vacuum cleaner. Brilliant little vacuum motor & bucket for running workshop cyclones. Cheaper than Earlex and a better filter as standard.

Aldi fireplace pre-cyclone. Great for routers, too small for anything that makes chips.

Laser cutters - I'm now running nearly a horsepower of extractor fan. More suction is good!

In general, yes go for it with making a cyclone. It's surprising just how well they work, no matter quite how badly you make them. Smoothing out airflow etc. is worth it for reducing noise, rather than improving suction.

Collapsible hose is evil. Collapses when it's under vacuum (ie nozzle blocked) and it pulls stuff over.