New used cyclone for me! but with questions!!

[todd bourassa]

Well Ive been using the HF 2hp DC with trash can separater for yrs hoping someday to save up enough for cyclone. Last week I saw a cyclone in CL for $350. Emailed and found out it was a homemade one from the Wood Mag. Plans. Drove to look at it. Very well made with heavy guage sheet metal, 2hp 220 volt motor, 14 impeller, 6 in inlet/outlet, neutral vane added, and 2 canister filters with clean out box, and trash can. And it really sucks!!! I thought wow, this is nice for home made and bought it. He was upgradeing a bunch of equipment and wanted longer runs for DC. I finally got it set up this last weekend. I am just running running it with a single 6in line wyed off to 2 4in flex hose lines, 1 for TS and the other to move around to other machines. I found that when running planer, jointer that I am getting lots of chips in my cannister and clean out box, not fine dust. I think what is happening is the trash can gets about 3/4 full it starts sucking the chips into the filters. Does that sound right???? Is that normal for a cyclone?? Basically I will have to check the trash can quite often when collecting heavy chips from jointer and planer to empty it half full or so?
Seems like a lot of frequent emptying to me. Is this the way the all cyclones work?

Thanks
todd

[Rod Sheridan]

Either the cyclone has poor separation efficiency or there's an air leak at the bottom where the chip barrel goes.

The connection to the chip barrel has to be airtight.

I doubt if you could get a garbage can to seal that tight, that's why they use a barrel with those band clamps on many cyclones.

Regards, Rod.

[Thom Sturgill]

Rod is right, check your seal, but this is also why the cyclones built to Bill Pentz's plans have a longer funnel. Even with those (ClearVue) I have read about a lot of users having optical sensors to tell them when to empty as they often put the cyclone in a closet. . From what I've read the wood magazine design primarily separates solids and does not do a good job of DUST collection - it leaves that to the filters.