Originally Posted by
Bill Adamsen
Robert and Mike. I've done a fair amount of vacuum bagging, so the moment Robert suggest "the leaking barrel," I decided to wrap the barrel with plastic (a bag) to test the theory. Sure enough, as you can see in the photo above, the plastic bag has tightly conformed to the cardboard barrel. It's not unlike what a vacuum veneering bag looks like when compressing a veneer of composite. It indicates that there is a leak somewhere in the barrel or barrel fittings.
From my experience with vacuum bagging, I can tell you that any time you have a setup requiring sealing tape, it can be extremely challenging to stop the leaks. While I believe the barrel is leaking in a multitude of places, even a single leak in the wrong place will create the vacuum effect we're seeing with the bag over the barrel. So a bag inside the barrel would require the area between bag and barrel to have much smaller leak than anywhere else, or else the bag could end up inside the cyclone chamber. Does anyone successfully put a bag inside their cyclone?