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.