Jet DC cone tech - WHY NO RETROFIT????

[Erik France]

Glen over at Popular Woodworking had a recent blog on the new Vortex. It has some good photos of it. He also did an informal test:

I decided to pull the cone from our unit and see what differences I could see, if any.

Immediately I noticed the dust caked to the underside of the cone. That meant there was a large amount of waste hitting the cone and that dust wasn’t traveling into the canister. With the cone out of the machine, I replaced the canister and flipped on the switch. Sure enough the tornado was much higher with the cone removed – I had found no film shenanigans. I let the machine run a few minutes before checking the canister for waste. I was amazed at the amount of crap that made its way into the canister. The cone does keep much of the waste out of the top section of the collector.

[Matt Meiser]

Photos for comparison. Looks like there's a some hardware, a bracket and the cone. Order the latter two as service parts and head to the hardware store.



Here's a photo of an old-style one from the web.

[Sean Hughto]

Thanks. Now that I've seen those close up pictures, I can make one of those for about $10 in materials. I assumed it was a little more complex and engineered than that! No wonder Jet doesn't want to sell a retrofit! They could never sell the retrofit for enough that folks would buy the new model! Everyone would just by the regular 1100 and pop in the cone.

[Dave Lehnert]

People like to bash Shopsmith but I like Shopsmith because 99.9% of the new stuff they come out with is backward compatible. Just buy the upgrade and mount it on. This for tools made as far back as 1950's
For example http://www.shopsmith.com/ownersite/catalog/500to510.htm
or
http://www.shopsmith.com/ownersite/c...aringquill.htm

[Myk Rian]

I'm with Sean on this one. A retrofit would be good policy.
As far as companies offering upgrades, ever download and install a service pack for Windows, for free?

[Jeff Monson]

Photos for comparison. Looks like there's a some hardware, a bracket and the cone. Order the latter two as service parts and head to the hardware store.



Here's a photo of an old-style one from the web.

Thanks Matt, A picture is worth a thousand words! "Vorex" is a pretty snazzy word for a piece of dome shaped sheet metal. I'll be making one next week and putting it to the test. Maybe the clear vue thats on my wish list will bet bumped down a couple notches.

[Matt Meiser]

By the way, those aren't my photos--they are linked from PWW's blog and some random photobucket account.

[Ruhi Arslan]

When I came across the demonstration video of the Vortex version of the same old DC few days ago, not aware of this thread already going on, my thoughts were "that should be easy to retrofit". The two characters in the video review pretending to be funny but unsuccessfully. Also, what I noticed which is most relevant to this topic here is that they really were bashing the previous version as such an inferior product. I don't expect anyone to go ahead and buy the Vortex version if they already have the conventional one but more likely be willing to pay for an optional add-on upgrade. It just makes sense to offer it in my opinion. I personally use a lid-over-bin-first-stage-separator and don't have much of an issue with canister getting clogged but I would still buy the upgrade if it were to be offered.

What I consider in a similar situation, I recently ordered a part as an upgrade for one of my motorcycles. Bike was designed as a track bike but made available for the street. Street riding resulted high running temperatures causing coolant boiling over, etc. Owners like myself spent over thousands to make the bike street ridable, changing exhaust, removing CAT, new computer, etc. Eventually, water pump was determined as the issue not being sufficient with the extra power for the modified model. Manufacturer (MV Agusta) never admitted that there is a common known "problem" but on the other hand developed a "modified high performance water pump housing and impeller". Priced it for $125 and made it available, without any liability, as an optional accessory. JET can do the same as well and offer the conical baffle as an optional performance accessory to the previous customers who otherwise wouldn't buy the Vortex version. It would help to recoup some of the development cost besides making previous owners happy. My two and a half cents...

P.S. At some place on their website, it says "patented" but I couldn't find one when I did a quick search.

[Mark Carlson]

Was I the only one that was underwhelmed with the Vortex? It looked like most of the fine dust was still getting to the filters.

~mark

[Joe Leigh]

I think the picture with the sawdust was the same collector without the vortex.

[Erik France]

When Sean first started this thread I was thinking that there was more to the Vortex. Possibly some changes to the DC configuration, complicated mounting, etc. making a retrofit impractical. Now with those photos, I don't see any valid reason why Jet shouldn't offer it as a retrofit. They might in the future if they listen to their customers.

[Larry Frank]

I have the Jet Dust collector and would very much like to be able to get a retrofit for it. However, I do not blame Jet for not offereing it. They probably spent a lot of money developing it and expect to make a profit from it. I think that every company is a for profit operation. They are in the business to make money not to be a charity. I would love to have them just give me a upgrade for nothing but that just simply will not happen. Is there any woodworking machinery company out there that would do something similar? When a company puts out a new table saw with something like a better riving knife do they automatically offer a cheap upgrade for the older saws? If they do, then I missed it.
This same thing is happening over and over as companies introduce new models with new features. I have no expectation that they will offer me a cheap way of getting the upgrade. However, I am hoping that some brilliant person on the creek will post a design and instructions for the rest of us to do a similar type of upgrade to our dust collectors.

[Paul Wunder]

Lee Styron at Sharkguard developed his product a number of years ago, beginning with version 1.0. I just purchased his version 10.4. My understanding is that all of his earlier versions were upgradeable to later versions by the purchase of a modestly priced upgrade kit.

Now, that is a business model that I can applaud

[Phil Thien]

I should have retrofit Thien Baffles available for testing in approx. two weeks. That is provided the laser cutting shop I use will be able to slide a smaller sample job between some production runs (they should be able to, they've been very accommodating in the past).

I tried cones when I was prototyping. They worked okay at preventing chip scrubbing. My baffle shape worked soooo much better than cones on the fines, though.

[Kevin Gregoire]

jet will have to offer the cones as service parts for the new collectors and people will just order them and install on the old machines. looks very simple to do in my opinion.