Cyclone installation started

[David Keast]

My new cyclone kit arrived some time ago, but it has been so cold in the workshop that I just could not face it. Today it started to thaw, temperatures above 0° for the first time, day or night for a couple of weeks. Road conditions quite terrible, water on top of ice - we woke to find a car on its roof balanced on the retaining wall behind the house, another metre or so and it would have fallen another 4m and ended up in our salon :

No-one in it - nothing said, very strange, we are miles from nowhere, so the driver must have had quite a walk.
However, back to the real topic : the warmer conditions mean I've made a start on the drop box. Plan is to make a tall slim airtight box (workshop floor space is precious) with one side removable and a lightweight inner box to fit that can be removed for emptying. That way, none of the pipework to or from the cyclone needs to move to empty the box. Making the box tall should help make best use of the volume as the chips will tend to fill more evenly than with a wide shallow box.
The other big advantage is that it puts the top of the cyclone quite high up on the wall and I plan to "plumb" straight through the ceiling and fit the extractor in the attic where I store wood for drying. Should reduce the noise in the shop and shift the problem of dust from my old-style bag filter to a place where no-one works normally.

[Cyrus Brewster 7]

Flipping a car - that is some CFM you DC is creating. Maybe you should not vent outside.

[Aaron Ledbetter]

No-one in it - nothing said, very strange, we are miles from nowhere, so the driver must have had quite a walk.

Escape convict and grand theft auto? Maybe Aliens? How about a very precise tornado?

Seriously though - that is quite bizarre... Glad to see that it didn't wreck your salon.

[David Keast]

In and working !!! A couple of half days were needed to fiddle with the plumbing and to dismantle and cart the extractor unit to the attic and re-assemble it, and today I connected the last piece of pipework and switched on.

IT WORKS !!

This is the whole thing, located next to the door for easy access with a barrow to remove and empty the drop box. The outlet side of the cyclone goes up through the workshop ceiling to the extractor which is now in the attic of the barn where I keep my stocks of boards to dry. There is still a collection bag on the extractor, but I'm hoping it wont need emptying very often. I've used a large sheet of flooring chipboard as a back plate 'cos the old stone walls with their soft lime mortar never seem to have a suitable place to put a fixing where you need one.



The HUGE drop box (80 x 40 x 50cm) is fitted into the outer, airtight (mastic seals over glued joints) box that the cyclone sits on. It is designed to be removed with a wheel barrow. With 30 acres of woodland and a big garden, disposal is not really an issue, only transport.



The box front clamps down onto thick weather seals using over centre toggles to hold everything in compression.



The plumbing is all smooth bore 100mm waste pipe, with one run across the ceiling to a number of different points and another run down the wall to the TS and PT outlets (via a flexible).



So far I've tested it with a few handfulls of sawdust from a bin and it looks good.

[Brad Gobble]

LOVE that box ... well done!!