Anyone build a outside/inside DC that can be emptyed with a tractor?

[Larry Edgerton]

I want to build a collection system that dumps into a shed type thing outside and returns the air back inside, but without all the dust

I laugh at the little barrel things, I make some chips. I've filled ten 55 gal bags in one day, 4-6 quite often, so I want something I can empty with the tractor. Maybe a dump trailor.

I looked at industrial stuff, but is too big or too expensive, or both. Its too cold up here to blow 2000 CFM outside, I'd freeze to death.

What are some of you small commercial guys solutions?

Larry

[Matt Jutte]

Back in the day we had the same issue when we went to a 6 head moulder and the amount of wood chips and dust was overwhelming. For dust collection we had a 15 hp. cyclone and dust bags inside of our shop. we built a hopper on the bottom of the cyclone and attached a rotary air lock that would drop the material onto a small 8" conveyor that had a small 16" square opening in the wall. The conveyor dumped out into a trailer that a horse farmer supplied us. the best part is the 150 cash we recieved when he picked up the trailer 3x a week. Once we had this done we could run for 8 hours + and not miss a beat. the rotary airlock had a 12" square opening and it was a variable speed, not too sure where we got it from though.

[Matthew Sherman]

Could you rig something up where you run your ducting outside then have a place where you park a trailer. Have some type of enclosed trailer and have flexible ducting to hook up an in and out for the air. This would act like a big separator and have your filter bags inside as a secondary filter and to get your air back.

[Josh Bowman]

Per a suggestion from Keith Outten, I removed my filters from my 2hp grizzly and ran the hose outside for a while. The increase in flow was remarkable. So then I mounted the fan unit in the attic of my shop and piped it outside in a 4" pipe. The force was so great that it blew the chips right out of my garden trailer! So I plumbed the 4" pipe into the side of an 10" stove pipe with the top open and a 4" 45 aiming the exhaust downward. That seems to have solved the problem. Now when the trailer gets full I just hook up my tractor to it and haul it into the woods for the bugs to eat. I don't recirc the air, I do have a gas furnace with a power vent and have very carefully monitored the shops air pressure and for CO. So far not any issues. With no "filtered" air coming back into the shop, the shop stays less dusty as well.

[Larry Edgerton]

Whatever I come up with will be switchable, in other words for part of the year it will just vent outside, but in the colder months it has to recirculate the warm air back inside. I am quite far north and have some very cold temps to deal with, so the added cost of reheating the lost warm air is not really an option. I would love to just blow it outside. Not an option for me.With a one man shop I have to be efficient.

[Joe A Faulkner]

This is somewhat an out of the box idea (yeah okay, pun intended). I suppose one could attach an auger of some type to the base of a dust bin, and you could auger the saw dust out of the shop. I'm guessing it would be pretty expensive. You might check around with folks in the area that make, sell grain storage systems. With a well designed auger system, you could move alot of saw dust.

[Perry Holbrook]

The rotary air lock is really the key here. Once you eliminate the need for an air tight collection container, you can come up with bunches of methods for handling the chips/dust. You see them sometimes in the on line auctions like IRS. They are usually 10in or larger and 3 phase and not all that cheap. I 've always wondered why the cyclone mfg haven't developed one for their home shop units. I've toyed with a few design ideas from time to time but never really put a lot of effort into it.

Back when I was an engineer in the furniture industry here in NC, we used augers all the time to move the chips from large collection "houses" to an injection sytstem that blew the chips into a large steam boiler.

[Kent A Bathurst]

Big-time operations [I've been involved in dust/chip/shavings systems for >>$1mm, with a few 250hp motors] somtimes work it this way:

Enclosure [roof + 2 sides] big enough for 2 open-top 45' trailers side-by-side. Waste stream out of air lock onto belt. Belt has a diverter for trailer 1 v trailer 2. Waste dumps into front of trailer, and there are augers running the length of the trailers, mounted they are just hanging in the air a foot or so above the trailer sides. The waste falls in over the auger into the trailer, the pile builds up, and the auger turns and drags the top of the pile toward the back of the trailer. When its full, move the diverter to the other trailer, tarp trailer #1 and swap it with an empty. Seen more than 1 trailer per hour. You CANNOT afford to screw this up - if there's no where for the waste to go, you shut down the plant.

Waste stream values are different for hte different products, so there are completely separate systems. For example, a big, high-speed molder or planer/matcher will have piping for the splitter heads to pick up the dust, and a separate system with piping to pickup the shavings.

I have occasionally looked to see if there is a small airlock - something like 1 hp - but I don't think anyone in their right mind would ever want one that small, and they probably don't exist in my spot on the space-time continuum.

[Chris Parks]

This is somewhat an out of the box idea (yeah okay, pun intended). I suppose one could attach an auger of some type to the base of a dust bin, and you could auger the saw dust out of the shop. I'm guessing it would be pretty expensive. You might check around with folks in the area that make, sell grain storage systems. With a well designed auger system, you could move alot of saw dust.

I like this idea and am working on a design at the moment for a small commercial operation. I don't think it needs to be very expensive, at least for a commercial shop where time is money and the investment can be recouped in time saved. Build a box with hopper chute, drive the auger through the box wall with an electric motor, return for the dollars spent would be quickly recovered I should think.

[Joe A Faulkner]

Keep us posted. If you pursue this, it would be interesting to see what you come up with.

[Rod Nikkel]

This is somewhat an out of the box idea (yeah okay, pun intended). I suppose one could attach an auger of some type to the base of a dust bin, and you could auger the saw dust out of the shop.

We have wondered about such a thing as well, but the problem is keeping it air tight so you don't get dust sucked back up and into your filters. Perhaps a push through configuration would work though. I've seen Alan Schaftter's pictures a few times on the forum. Here is one place: http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthre...cyclone-owners You could have something like that dumping into a large container you connect to the cyclone but it wouldn't have to be air tight. If you had a bit of a closet around the cyclone, motor and return air tubing, the air shouldn't get all that much colder for the short duration it is outside, especially since the motor will be putting out a fair amount of heat. At least our 5 hp Leeson does. If it gets really warm in the summer you might need more air circulation around the motor. Just some ideas. And as Joe says, please let us know what you come up with.

[Chris Parks]

I don't see a sealing problem, well I haven't built it yet so time will tell. The auger chute should be able to be capped and sealed easily as I will build it in PVC and use a screw cap to suit. The auger drive will run through a sealed bearing in the wall of the box and a secondary seal behind that. The motor will be mounted on the wall of the box driving the shaft through the seals so it seems to me to be fairly straight forward. Finding the time to build, well that is another matter.

[Scott T Smith]

I want to build a collection system that dumps into a shed type thing outside and returns the air back inside, but without all the dust

I laugh at the little barrel things, I make some chips. I've filled ten 55 gal bags in one day, 4-6 quite often, so I want something I can empty with the tractor. Maybe a dump trailor.

I looked at industrial stuff, but is too big or too expensive, or both. Its too cold up here to blow 2000 CFM outside, I'd freeze to death.

What are some of you small commercial guys solutions?

Larry

Larry, the system that I designed and built for my shop incorporates a garage structure that houses a large dump truck adjacent to the shop. There are two 6' x 8' port holes between the garage and the shop, covered with filter cloth, to provide for the return air.

The two dust collection systems discharge into a distrubution box above the dump truck. There is a sleeve of filter cloth that runs between the distribution box and the dump truck, effectively capturing the majority of the dust in the dump truck. The filter cloth covered port holes between the structures serve as secondary filters for any dust that escapes from the primary system.

I use two different blowers, a 25hp system and a 3 hp system. Any equipment that generates a fine dust (such as the wide belt sander and horizontal resaw) is ducted to the 3 hp system. The small system is designed so that the air flow within the ductwork will not exceed 1500 CFM (which prevents the buildup of sufficient static electricity for an explosion). The major shavings producers (jointer/planer, moulder, etc) are all ducted to the larger blower. There are gates on each system to prevent backflow through one when the other is in use.

All duct work is metal, and grounded directly from the ductwork to my ground grid. Both my shop and the garage are extremely well insulated, and I have radiant heating in the floor of both.

It's nice not to lose my conditioned air, and also makes it easy to transport the shavings and compost them onto my pastures.

[Larry Edgerton]

Scott

That is basically the system that I had designed, two circuits that service both side of the shop in 6" with two blowers that come together at the point where I would put the wide belt[don't have one yet] so that it could be serviced. I sometimes run three machines at once roughing out stock, jointer, tablesaw, and planer, so the planer would be on one side and the saw and jointer on the other. These would dump into a hopper of my own design that I could dump with my tractor/forks. All of this would be housed in a block building to conserve heat and dampen noise. I do have one neighbor, and I don't want troubles on that front as I am not in an industrial zoned site.

I spent some time on the phone with Bill Pentz yesterday and he says that one of my blowers, 16" with a 5 hp would service both sides and be enough for a wide belt. That will leave me with a backup, but I still may plumb with both. I was planning on two cyclones, and he thought one 18" would be plenty, so as he knows infinitely more than me on the subject I'll take his word for it. I am going to build the cyclones myself out of steel using his design.

The auger/airlock designs are interesting but I don't feel they are necessary for my small shop, and are just another thing that would need maintainance.

Scott, I am going to end the cycle with cartridge filters but am planning on adding a large filter/circulation system like I had in my last shop that filters all the air once the lights are turned on. Where do you get that filter medium? I used good quality furnace filters in my last shop, but that gets expensive.

I've seen a lot of your pictures over on the forestry forum, you are the toy man I have to say! I used to be the toy man around here but through a series of unfortunate events, not so much any more.

Thanks to everyone for their thoughts and suggestions.

Larry

[Larry Edgerton]

Another quick note....

Recently I have been picking up more work than I like doing reproduction work in Azek, a plastic product. I kind of forgot about that, but I may need two collection boxes, one for stuff I can compost, and one for stuff that needs to go to a landfill. At times I will have more than one job going at a time, so I need to be able to switch fairly fast. Any thoughts on that let me know.