Finishing up my Clear Vue cyclone install

[Ryan Brucks]

Hey guys,

I have been finishing up my Clear Vue cyclone install over the weekend. I previously got some cyclones delivered broken apart by UPS. Only last Friday did I finally get a functional unit. CV was very apologetic and quick to send replacements each time. While I waited the previous week or two, I hung my ductwork, prepared steel drum for use, made an acrylic blade guard etc.

I have the CV1800lh body with a CVmax impeller and blower housing and nano filters. It is off in a corner of my garage behind a dividing wall. I had a make a hole in the wall for the intake chute. I also had to disable one garage door and remove some of the hardware to fit the ducts. This was no big deal since this part of my garage is sectioned off for the dogs (5 of them).

Slightly more annoying, I had to remount the other garage door opener a few inches higher to fit the ducts.

The space the cyclone is in is really small, only 39" wide by 38" deep or so. On top of that, a brick foundation layer takes up a few inches so the effective width is only aorund 36.5 or so.









Installing the cyclone itself was pretty easy, except for the part about lifting it up and slipping some plywood on top of the barrel then tightening those plastic tabs. Bit of a juggling act but I managed.

I was previously contemplating some kind of door to reduce the noise level, but after trying the unit all hooked up last night, it really wasnt any louder than my old HF2hp dc... in fact might even be a tad quieter. Now things do get really loud when standing right next to it, but across the garage where my actual tools are, it's not bad. (keen observers will notice the melamine sheet covering the lower part of the cyclone area... this is a pee shield, as one of my dogs occasionally still likes to have an accident, with a tendency to lift the leg.... NOT on my wynn filters thank you very much!!!)


A little more involved was making the acrylic blade guard based on the wood central plans. This is an old photo from last week, now it's fully connected to the ceiling and a 4" duct.






It's adjustable on all 3 axes since the cu300 is mobile and might not get put back into the exact same spot (although I rarely move it). This also means it can be moved aside for tenoning on the table saw.

The only work I have left is to continue the 8" mains over to where it will feed my 6" kapex downdraft table and router table/sanding area.




I will take some more photos later of all the ductwork done.


I have only run a few test cuts with the saw, but it worked wonderfully in terms of collection at the point. I am not yet sure if the dust bin has a leak or not, since I could observe what appeared to be some updraft keeping the wood chips circling the cyclone instead of dropping down. I am told some of that is normal, but there are some tests I can do to check. I tried using the incense and closing all the blast gates to find leaks, but didn't really find anything. In some spots the smoke seemed more turbulent, but I never saw it go into the lid seam.

I called CV and Cathy suggested taping a strip of trash can bag or some plastic liner around the lid seam, then turning on the unit and observing the bag for movement as a leak test.

I will continue to look into that later tonight and report back, but if anyone reads that and has any ideas or feedback, they are very welcome.

For those who don't know, it's essential to get a leak free seam at the bottom of the cyclone, as an updraft will send fines to the filters and keep them from settling. It remains to be seen if I have an issue or not. A custom acrylic lid is likely in my near future.

[Jim Neeley]

Looking good, Ryan... and very helpful since I'm closing on a new home in 3 weeks.. with a 4-car garage, soon to be 1-car + shop!

[Van Huskey]

Shaping up nicely!

[Michael W. Clark]

Looks good Ryan, I like the blade guard on the TS, too. Did you say that is from a plan or is that your design?

Try the plastic bag or little strips of light weight paper. Pieces of plastic grocery bags would also work. I'm not sure about taping them, but you could take a small piece of the paper or bag and move it around the joints to see if it pulls it in to leak. Smoke can sometimes be hard to see.

Mike

[Ryan Brucks]

Thanks guys,

Michael the plans are from http://www.woodcentral.com/bparticle...rm_guard.shtml

I modified the design of the acrylic part. In the guide the bottom opening is only around 11" long, but I made mine 19.5" long. The reason being I wanted to surround the riving knife as well as scoring blade on my saw. I also changed the design to taper inwards towards the bottom, but only because I made the opening so much longer. I was trying to keep the area smaller to maintain velocity in the guard.

It probably wasn't necessary since I now realize the real size that matters is the parimeter * height offset from the workpiece, not necessarily the 2d area of the opening. So my sloping design probably made a very small difference to the parimeter.

I also used a full 4" hole (actually 4 1/8" to fit the connector I had lying around).


I made my hand knobs out of teak scraps, and used 1/4" carriage bolts instead of regular bolts going into the teak knobs. That was another change just due to the increased weight of my guide over the plan's dimensions. I wanted to be able to tighten the knobs without the bolts slipping. Square holes were made in the aluminum by drilling 4 small holes in the corners and one larger hole in the center. Doesn't have to be perfect, just good enough.

there is also a "sliding key" of plywood up inside the top ceiling mount. this is attached to two of the holes on the vertical steel beam, and it keeps the beam at 90 degrees to the ceiling as you adjust it left/right. The guard itself is pretty sturdy. It only wiggles around 1/4" if you bump it with your fingers. the beam is held steady front/back by simply being snugly fit into a channel between the plywood pieces up top... that whole thing was just made up on the spot using some plywood I had.


*edit* oh yea, and the way I adapted the 1.25" steel tubing to take hardware, was I found a 1x1" strip of scrap cherry on my floor... this fit perfectly inside the steel tube. Then I just marked hole locations and tapped a few holes in the cherry. That's what I thread the hand knob into at the very top to control left/right position, as well as how I secured my sliding key. was really easy to mount that way.

[Robert Payne]

Nice installation, Ryan! I'll look forward to seeing you're finished installation with the McRabbet bin sensor and its control box -- maybe a few photos and a mini-review would be nice!

Best wishes and remember to work safe!

[Ryan Brucks]

I am getting there. I have a bunch more photos but haven't had time to upload them yet. Didn't do much last night due to the 4th, and the night before that also turned into a family night on account of my wife feeling left out lately

I did leak test the cyclone by taking a 55gal trashbag and putting my entire 30gal steel collection drum inside it. then I wrapped up the ends tight and taped it to the body of the cyclone as tight as I could, leaving lots of air in the bag. Then I ran the cyclone with all the blast gates closed for a few minutes and watched the bag for shrinkage. There was none, indicating I have no leak at the drum. I talked with Bill Pentz a bit about this and he explained what's going on with some of the larger chips not falling into the barrel. It has to do with them hitting the boundary between the two alternate direction vortices in the cyclone and he assured me it's nothing to worry about as long as there are no leaks.

The nordfab blast gates may need some work. They are fine when closed, but when a gate is open it's horribly leaky. The 6" blast gate to the table saw will suck your hand up to the gate. Going to have to seal it with something as there is a gap larger than 1/8" there. Was going to just make a slice of pine a bit thinner than 1/8" and screw it to the metal gate back on the outer part of the gate. These gate's are almost impossible to open or close with the cyclone running. But the "high quality" gates from nordfab run over 300 bucks each! I have some clearvue 6" gates that are much less leaky, but sadly I need to use the nordfab ones in a few spots because of how heavy the ducting is... the clearvue would crack apart in no time if used to connect heavy angled spans of metal ducting. probably fine for the end of a run though.

The mcrabbet sensor install will be fun but I have been putting it off until I get all the heavy lifting parts of the project done.

I have been heat forming some of the clear vue 6 to 4" transitions. With a little shrinkage, they fit inside nordfab quickfit piping very nicely. then 4-6 sheet metal screws secure it in place.

[Ryan Brucks]

both my favorite and most hated thing about the nordfab ducting is how sturdy it is.

It's so sturdy that you can suspend a huge arrangement with half a dozen fittings from only 2 points.... but its so darn heavy you'd never be able to lift said arrangement of pipe to suspend it in the first place


they don't even bother packing the stuff... mine was literally wedged together in a box like some sort of demented 4d rubiks cube... you could tell they had just tossed it in, and then it had bounced around in shipping and gotten all tangled. I was horrified and worried it was all ruined. A few ends of the long pipe were slightly ovaled... but this seems to have fixed itself merely by using the quick fit clamps.

[Ryan Brucks]

last night when cutting some oak veneer ply, it was quite a bit messier than the birch ply I was cutting the night before. looks like splinter sized chips get shot out of the blade under the front of the guard.

I am thinking of attaching some door-sweep bristle strips around the parimeter of the blade guard. I have seen this on most professionally made CNC shoes so it should help here too. It will help alot because the minimax chip-guard is about 1.5" thick... meaning when cutting a 3/4" thick panel, right now the closest my guard can get is 3/4" away from the workpiece. Using the parimeter math, thats around 32 square inches of area... or almost 3x that of a 4" duct (12.5 square inches). I am losing too much velocity as a result and not getting optimal performance.

Some people make their own spliter guards but I don't see myself doing that. The door bristles would close most of that gap and would be flexible enough to move away from the splinter guard.

[Ryan Brucks]

I was a bit delayed working on the ducting because things weren't fitting quite right, as you can see in this picture:




The inlet reducer was bumping the garage door track, which meant the short span of 6" flex had to snake sideways into the inlet (hard to tell in the above photo but it was poorly aligned). I also didn't like having the 30 degree bend after the Wye. It was reversed previously but I was having trouble fitting the span of 8" flex you see to the left between the metal ducts.

I did a little finagling and removed one of the garage door rails so I could have the duct go right up to the inlet for a smoother shot.



Seems like alot of work... 'why not just move the inlet forward a few inches instead' you ask? Sadly I cannot because the side door out of the garage is right next to my filters, and as it is, the filter keeps the door from opening past 80 degrees. Even another inch forward and it would restrict the door to opening only at 45 degrees.... and this means it would get bumped by the dog and compromise the seal with the blower etc. So this was my compromise.

Removing the rail also allowed me to scoot the whole ducting back a few inches, in order to put the 30 degree bend first instead of the wye, and still have (barely) enough room for the 8" flex connection to the 8" mains around the shop.





This is the other side. Didn't line up exactly as I had hoped, mostly because my saw and jointer fence are taking up so much wall space. I had hoped to use a different fitting (6 x 4 x 4 reducing branch) on the right side so there would be less volume to plug, but it didn't fit. Thankfully I had an extra clear vue transition. If any dust piles do buildup in that right transition, at least I will be able to see them and open the 4th gate. In normal operation 3 of those clearvue gates are open for the kapex.



I tested out the downdraft and it works really well. I can actually feel some suction on the table which is more than I had hoped for. I am using rockler 4" dustright hose connecting to yet another clearvue transition for the downdraft. It's not the best hose, and one of the hoses has a tear in it (see duct tape), but a little restriction is good so I get some airflow through the 2.5" pipe to the kapex itself.


And this is what I mean when I talk about the cu300 splinter guard keeping my blade guard 3/4" above sheet goods, simply due to its size. I can certainly remove it, but it's a useful alignment tool for me and can help protect edges (not sure how necessary it is). I will try some cuts without it and with the guard a bit lower.




Somebody please help! I seem to be descending into a crappy Brazil remake... think I just spotted deniro!

[Robert Payne]

Lots of ductwork there Ryan! Hopefully all of the flex won't impact your airflow from your tablesaw guard and your Festool Mitersaw too much. Looking forward to seeing your installation of the Bin Sensor.

[Ryan Brucks]

According to the pentz sp calculator, my 4" blade guard actually needed some restriction otherwise it would let in too much cfm, dropping the sp too much and reducing flow at the lower table saw port. The cu300 internal flex from the lower port is pretty bad so i accounted for that in my calcs.

I am targeting 800/500 the 500 being the blade guard. That 5 or 6 feet of flex just happened to be the approximate restriction to get roughly those numbers at similar sp's for both ports.


In fact pretty much everything about my duct design was geared towards getting the lowest losses to the cu300 saw ports. I agree I have too much ducting... A pain! Mr. Pentz specifically recommends running the mains to the center of the shop not around the perimeter. He even reminded me of this during a phone chat. But in my case there were certain factors that made that difficult so yet another compromise was necessary.

First issue, the larger lower cu300 port can't come from the center of the room since I need room for the slider on all sides, plus room for jointer changeovers etc.... branching from a main from the center of the shop back to the wall and down and over again would be over double the length and losses to the saw than my current setup....

Combine that with the fact that the 4" dust port can't move enough cfm to keep a 6" mains dust free, means I couldn't even use that 6 mains for the blade guard, I would need a separate branch anyways to reach the other side of the shop for router/mitersaw downdraft area. Currently I use a separate 5" branch for the blade guard and shaper hood.

Also combine that wither the fact I have the bandsaw over in the corner and the garage door and lighting fixtures to maneuver around, and this was about the only solution I could come up with that would still allow me to run a full 6" main around the shop. The main is actually 8" for most of its horizontal length until the other wall is reached so the losses there are minimal.

I will still have an accessory/clean out port off of the 5" blade/shaper branch as this is near the center of the shop and has wicked cfm... Good enough for using a floating hoodd during hand routing or hand sanding operations on the bench near the center of the shop.

Then on the other side I still have yet to extend the 6" mains out from above the cabinets where in the future it will feed a combination router downdraft table.

[Maxwell Heathcott]

I have been heat forming some of the clear vue 6 to 4" transitions. With a little shrinkage, they fit inside nordfab quickfit piping very nicely. then 4-6 sheet metal screws secure it in place.

I realize this is a very old thread, but I'm about to start putting together my system, and I think I'm going to follow a similar route to yours. I'm curious about how you "heat formed" the 6" to 2 x 4" transitions to fit the Nordfab. (I was planning to some 6.25" ID machine adapters fabbed that would slip over the transitions.) I'm also curious how you dealt with the Nordfab at the intake manifold. I didn't see if you upgraded to the "Max" manifold or not, but I'm just going with the stock manifold. Plan there was to have a 6.25" OD machine adapter fabbed to slide into the manifold, which would then taper to a standard clamp-together rolled end to join up with the main trunk line. I've seen others suggest a simple Femco fitting (something like this that would go over the outside of the intake and then mate directly to the main trunk line).