I decided I didn’t want to 3D print a dust separator, so I decided to see if I could use 4" PVC pipe to do it. I only went with 4" because it’s a bit smaller than the lid of the dust collection container I plan to use. This went together better than I thought for the first attempt. I need to allow a bit of extra room for the pipe to fit into the pockets for it, and I need to make the outside margin bigger, so that the lid fits between the bolts.
The inlet is a 1" coupler. The OD of 1" Sch40 is a bit bigger than the size of my vacuum hose, so I figure I can put some tape around it and make it snug, and eventually make a little adapter for it. I fit the coupler to the 4" pipe by rough cutting the radius on my bandsaw, and then wrapping a piece of sand paper around the 4" pipe, and sanded it down until I had a good snug fit. Then it was just attached with PVC cement.
Hopefully I have some more scrap 1/2" plywood in the garage or shed so I can cut out version 2 yet tonight.
Been having trouble getting it to fit right because I was relying on dimensions of pvc from websites instead of measuring it. Doing my final cuts now, and hopefully testing it soon. I figure of the mini cyclones work, this one should.
I emptied the filter bag out the best I could, and then sucked back up what was in it (which included previous cuts), along with the piles from the picture, and not too much made it back in the bag it seems.
I cleaned out the vacuum and jar last night. I couldn’t get the filter bag perfectly clean though. After doing another 3"x3"x0.25" pocket this is what was in the vacuum vs what was in the jar. Most of what is shown in the vacuum fell off the filter bag. The bag doesn’t seem much dirtier than it was before. The jar has about a cups worth of dust in it. Overall, I think it’s working ok. At some point I’ll weigh out some dust, and then suck it up and see how much of that ends up in the jar. Won’t be real accurate though, because some of the dust sticks to the walls of the jar.
So, my intention was to do a bunch of cuts, fill the jar, then take a picture of that, compared to the vacuum. Well, last night I found the one flaw in the design. It doesn’t do well with large chips. I was cutting a pocket that ran parallel to the grain of the wood, and it kept removing long strips of wood. They clogged up the opening in the baffle, but also clogged up my hose. I ended up having to pull the vacuum hose out of the baffle to get things cleaned up and sucked up a bunch of it into the vac directly, ruining my experiment. But, it was about a quarter of the way full before that, and still hardly any material in the vac.
