I searched the Internet woodworking forums for help. To use one of these spreadsheets you need to know woodshop cyclone design effect airspeed and woodshop cyclone design effect volume we will be working with, the amount of material to be separated, and the sizing of this material. This design may work well outside, but when downscaled and brought indoors creates problems. Since the desigh fire marshal and building codes required good chip collection in most industrial facilities, so chip collection remains well understood. With my soldered cyclone the total weight was about pounds total so finding dampeners each designed to hold between thirty and forty pounds worked out well as each individual shock mount should have a capacity of about one quarter that total weight. Not all communities allow this so we are fortunate. Tin both pieces before making the cone or cylinder.

These particles cut and tear fine vacuum filter fibers, especially when we either shake or blow our filters to unblock them. Human bodies are not protected from the smaller invisible particles, which can slip by our natural defences and get lodged in our respiratory tissues where they cause scaring and release toxins. Woods contains toxic chemicals cause irritation, allergic reactions, asthma, poisoning, and even increase our risk of cancer.

Peer reviewed medical studies show that every exposure to fine airborne dust causes a measurable loss in respiratory capacity and some of this loss becomes permanent. For a recent review of these health effects check out this doctoral thesis by Jette B.

Lange on the subject. After research into fine dust collection, we chose to build a Bill Pentz cyclone separators for the Dust Sniper project. Ok so two vacuums may not move the kinds of volumes of air needed to get all the fine dust from tools Woodshop Design And Layout like a table saw, or planer thicknesser, so it is still important to wear a dual cartridge, NIOSH approved dust mask and try to maintain a good outside airflow while producing your masterpieces.

Good dust collection must get rid of both the large and fine particles. Most vacuums, dust collectors and cyclones provide excellent large particle collection with various levels of convenience, but almost all come with open filters that freely pass the unhealthiest dust.

Only vacuums provide the pressure needed to work with our tools that have smaller ports, but workshop vacuums are almost always difficult to empty and require frequent replacement of expensive fine filter bags. We wanted to minimize our need to empty and replace these expensive filter bags.

There seem to be four main strategies people use to try and intercept dust before it gets to the filters — three of which simply pass the unhealthiest dust right through, which quickly loads up and ruins any fine filters we may have. Cyclonic dustbin lid separators like this or trashcan separator lids separate using a combination of drop box and cyclonic action.

A drop box works by putting a small pipe into a large sealed space which slows the airspeed enough that heavier items drop out of the air stream.

The better of these separator lids add a cyclonic swirling action to this drop box effect to permit using much smaller containers. But these simply pass the filter-ruining airborne dust right through. This means it also simply passes the filter ruining airborne dust right through. A cyclone uses gravity and centrifugal force created by swirling air to separate. We call them cyclones because they create a small cyclone or tornado inside a sealed cylinder and cone.

You simply spin the air inside so the heavier dust particles get pushed to the wall and cleaned air exits out the top. Traditional cyclones use gravity to drop the heavier particles. A good cyclone separator keeps the tornado centered because if it wanders it sucks the dust right off the walls.

A well designed cyclone is shaped just right, so that it keeps a fixed airspeed to hold the material pressed to the sides as it drops into the sealed dust bin. It will also reverse the airflow right at the bottom of the cone. Reversing the air too low lets the internal tornado suck material out of the dust bin bad. I engineered better air routing inside the cyclone.

This reduced overhead by about one third so improved airflow. Still, it still only moved about two-thirds as much air as the identical powered dust collector.

Fine airborne dust continued to fill my shop air, so I continued to have to work venting outside. Tired of burning up during the summer and freezing in the winter, I replaced that cyclone by building the highly touted Wood Magazine cyclone.

Sadly, it had exactly the same problems with cone plugging, filter plugging and dismal airflow. I fixed the cone plugging and increased airflow by coming up with a much more efficient blower and impeller design. An engineer friend came up with a filter stack to replace the external big bag filters, so I followed his lead modifying my dust collector to use a cartridge filter, plus built a filter stack with cleanout to make the still constantly required cleaning of my cyclone far easier.

Sunlight in my shop showed all of these units were still dust pumps. Disgusted and tired of wasting my limited time on dust collection instead of enjoying woodworking, I foolishly fell for some advertising hype.

I read an article in FWW magazine praising the virtues of a particular small shop cyclone that promised excellent health protection while giving good collection at three plus machines working at once. Knowing my children were starting to work more and more with me in my shop, I installed that top magazine rated cyclone with vendor designed and supplied ducting, plus vendor recommended fine filter upgrade. I had so much invested in this unit and it looked so pretty with its pretty metal cyclone, graduated ducting and blast gates at every machine that I gave it praise on the Internet when in fact I should have just thrown this system away immediately.

Even when trying to collect from a single machine, this system collected far worse than my prior cyclones or existing much more affordable dust collectors. Its cyclone cone and internal filter clogged constantly making for nasty cleaning chores that left me and my shop covered in the very dust I bought this system to avoid. There was not enough airflow to keep the vendor designed and supplied vertical duct runs from plugging or the horizontal runs from building up huge dust piles that posed a serious fire danger.

When the dust piles inside the duct broke loose they slammed down the duct so hard they kept blowing apart the joints. These piles went right through the cyclone and destroyed the fine filters in minutes. After three failed internal filters, this vendor had me pay for an expensive external bag filter.

They stupidly blew a blast of dust filled air on the side of the filter which quickly wiped out that filter as well, so I shifted over to the filter stack I had come up with for my Wood cyclone. Regardless, after less than three months use I decided to finish my Christmas projects then replace this system with a commercial cyclone and ducting from a reputable commercial vendor who guaranteed air quality.

As I went, I freely shared my dust collector and cyclone changes on the early woodworking forums, plus later summarized my suggested cyclone changes on my cyclone mods page. I also worked with most small shop cyclone makers and a few larger commercial vendors to make these same changes on their cyclones.

Now most large commercial vendors and all the small shop vendors except JDS, Jet and Laguna now sell cyclones that use my innovations. All this work still left us with small shop dust collectors cyclones that move too little air, need constant filter cleaning and replacement, plus are pretty much dust pumps. Woodworking makes so much airborne dust that instead of stepping up to more powerful blowers and much larger filters fine enough to protect our health, almost all small shop vendors upgraded their air cleaners, dust collectors and cyclones with open filters.

Filter material is expensive so smaller filters cost less. The more open filters allow the fine invisible unhealthiest dust that clogs and ruins filters to slip right, so customers do not have to spend so much time cleaning filters or have to replace filters nearly as often.

The problem is too open filters also fill our shop air with the very fine invisible particles that do the most damage to our health. My continuing to use that top magazine rated system was a huge mistake. I was rushed to the hospital with an apparent heart attack. My doctors found my heart did not get enough oxygen as I was having a bad allergic reaction. My reaction continued even in a clean room. Any time my medications were reduced my reaction became severe.

They called in a consulting respiratory physician. He determined fine wood dust trapped in my lungs kept triggering my reaction. I refused to believe that diagnosis as I had just had an allergy test that showed no allergies. New allergy testing proved with nasty sores that I had become severely allergic to a wide variety of woods.

After an extended hospital stay to address the double pneumonia that accompanied these problems, I finally went home heavily medicated. I immediately went back into respiratory distress. My respiratory physician suspected my home was contaminated. We did a very expensive super house clean up, but my problems continued with one bout of double pneumonia after another, so I finally paid for expensive air quality testing.

After having all cleaned and washed, my home air quality was still so bad that if this was a public building the EPA would have closed it down. Repair required installing a powerful air cleaner system, replacing the carpets with tile, repainting the walls and ceilings, and deep professional cleaning of all the furniture and drapes. I was expected to have to stay on supplemental oxygen for life. My respiratory doctor is also a very talented fine woodworker.

He said I had to stop woodworking. I am very stubborn and did not want to give up either my three generations of tools or my favorite hobby. My doctors still said no more woodworking until I did not have such strong allergic reactions. Unlike most, my engineering background allowed me to do some serious testing then come up with my own far better fine dust separating cyclone design. The airflow testing showed my expensive magazine top rated cyclone moved less than half its advertised air volume and its actual flow was far less than my dust collector it replaced.

This low air volume reduced the airspeed in the ducts so much that my ducts plugged constantly. This of course meant all of the fine dust separation was left up to the filters.

Digging into the engineering charts showed at typical dust loading and dust collection airflows my vendor used less than one quarter of the minimum filter surface area required. This way too small filter clearly explained why my filter clogged constantly. Worse, this same vendor designed ducting was not even high school quality.

Everyone knowledgeable about dust collection ducting design knows that air at these pressures is like water and will barely compress at all. As a result, any small tool port, overly restrictive tool hood, undersized duct or hose, or dirty filter will add enough resistance to all but kill the airflow we need for good collection. My vendor still uses a free computer ducting design program that specifies duct so restrictive in size it kills the airflow needed to keep the vertical runs from plugging.

The particle testing showed the expensive filter upgrade I purchased freely passed the invisible micron and smaller invisible dust particles known to cause the most health damage.

This inspired me to come up with a better solution. I figured out how to reduce internal turbulence that kills fine dust separation and figured out how to size the cyclone so its cone did not constantly plug and it did not suck the fine dust out of the dust bin. I studied the engineering on blowers and came up with blower designs for small shop cyclones that move more air with less power. I figured out what we needed to do to get tool hoods to work for us instead of against us.

I did the homework to learn how much air we had to move and at what speeds to get good fine dust collection. These refinements are well worth the little extra work to upgrade a basic design as this to something that will make a big difference.

Most who use my latest cyclone design find that they go from having to replace their fine filters every three months of full time woodworking or yearly for most small shop workers, to going six or more years before their particle meters show they need to do a filter replacement.

I strongly recommend making my 18" diameter if you are using a dust collection blower up to 5 hp and my 6" vacuum sized cyclone if working with a shop vacuum.

Since I did that work in early , our small shop market continues to be dominated by the same high budget advertisers whose focus is to sell equipment not provide health protection. I oversaw the testing of every major brand and size of small shop cyclone during and and since have overseen four different magazine tests on dust collectors and cyclones.

Rather than admit in these tests that the true measure of a cyclone separator is how well it separates, these vendor dominated magazine tests ignored cyclone separation and focused on airflows. Airflow mostly depends of how big and good our blowers are. These tests did not even look at working airflow but instead focused on maximum airflows which are about double what we will get with ducting and tools hooked up and a filter that is no longer brand new.

Most dust collector and cyclone vendors advertise and sell fine filters that freely pass the fine invisible unhealthiest dust. Finally, our small shop forums are filled with vendor paid shills and forum administrators who get paid to recommend the same poorly performing cyclones. I was kicked off a popular forum that I helped get going because one of the vendors paid that forum owner to advertise their products.

Likewise, these same forums are filled with first time cyclone buyers that are still convinced that because they spent so much, they got a great product. Clearly, you should not believe most available cyclone testing and recommendations. Since over twenty thousand small shop users have built or purchased my cyclone design.

Not just first time cyclone users, but those who are on their second and third cyclone and have experience with high-end commercial cyclones all send letters and emails that greatly praise this design. These experienced cyclone users consistently reported their 3 hp and smaller cyclones moved too little air. Those with particle counters such as the inexpensive 0.

For instance, D. Hayes wrote, "I use my large shop vacuum as my dust collector when turning batches of pens. Although this filter works great, when turning I have to constantly take the vacuum outside to clean that HEPA filter because it plugs very quickly. Tired of the filter cleaning disrupting my turning I bought an XXX brand cone type cyclone that sat before my vacuum. This substantial expensive cyclone separator simply moved the chips and sawdust to its collection bin with no noticeable improvement in keeping my fine filter clean.

I searched the Internet woodworking forums for help. Many said they got very good results with your mini cyclone, so I bought a 6" diameter cyclone of your design. The results are incredible. Almost all the fine dust ends up in the cyclone bin and I can go at least five times longer between the HEPA filter cleanings. Thank you for sharing such an incredible design! Wang wrote, "Like you I bought a 3 hp top magazine rated cyclone and it did not collect the fine dust as well as my 1.

Worse, I borrowed a friend's Dylos air quality meter and discovered that this cyclone came with such an open filter it saved up and filled my shop with the fine dust I wanted to avoid every time I turned on my cyclone.

I built one of your cyclones and upgraded to the much finer filters you recommend. I also did lots of work to improve my tool hoods and ports. Now the air quality in my shop consistently tests better than the excellent air quality we have outside here on California's northern coast. Thank you so much for your sharing and hard work! I built my first cyclone in about using plans from Shop Notes magazine and it worked terribly. As an incurable addict who has to figure out why something works poorly and needing to make repair I spent considerable wasted time researching, changing, and testing my existing expensive cyclone to try and improve its dismal airflow and separation efficiency.

In addition to gathering up changes recommended by other woodworkers I also extensively studied the cyclone research literature. One of the best sources of information was the work Woodshop Cyclone Design Png done on the Cotton Site that shares research and testing of various cyclone designs. After gathering this information I then built, tested and in many cases improved the various modifications and shared a little of what I did up through The best improvement in airflow came from adding Jim Halbert's "neutral vane" which reduced horsepower needs by reducing the cyclone internal turbulence.

When all was said and done I changed the cyclone dust chute outlet on the bottom of the cone, changed the cone angle, changed the cyclone diameter, changed the inlet size, changed to a rectangular inlet, changed the blower sizing and design, added a filter stack with lower cleanout, and changed the cyclone outlet tube to a more efficient size.

Before these improvements roughly one full horsepower of a 1. All of the major small shop vendors today now use variations of my modified cyclone design that I shared and put on my Cyclone Modifications web pages. Thanks to these efforts these cyclones move more air with less horsepower, are easier to empty, and it is far easier to clean the cyclone filters. This poor separation creates serious filter problems. When used with fine filters these cyclones put out so much fine dust the filters clog very quickly.

That clogging kills the airflow we need for good fine dust collection and quickly destroys our filters because the higher pressures force the fine sharp particles to cut and tear their way through the filters. Cleaning does the same thing but faster. This why I only recommend traditional cyclones should only be used without filters and vented directly outside. It is also what inspired me to build a better separating cyclone.

With a choice of giving up on a forty plus year woodworking hobby, I chose to spend my recovery time putting my three engineering degrees to work. I needed a solution that reduced how much dust went into the filter. Wearing a mask was not good enough because the fine dust lingers for months and would continue to get tracked into my home, office, and vehicles. The shared knowledge from those dust collection firms who guarantee customer air quality all say we must capture the fine dust as it gets made then get rid of that dust.

The fire and building codes require that dust collectors and cyclones either be placed outside behind explosion and fire proof barriers or that these units be certified as fire and explosion proof. Getting that certification is so expensive that all of the more affordable commercial dust collectors and cyclones required putting them outside. The ones setup for indoor use cost far more than my budget, plus required quarterly changing of many expensive cartridge filters.

Most also used large commercial three phase motors that my home electrical service would not support without getting a phase convertor which was expensive. This pushed me into doing more research on basic separation theory and cyclone design. My research convinced me that a cyclone was the best solution, but none of the seven fairly well studied cyclone designs offered a combination of fine separation with minimal power usage.

I went back to the basic swirl tube separation physics and cyclone design theory to come up with my own cyclone separator design. I tilted the neutral vane inlet, added a helical baffle known as an air ramp, plus changed the inlet and cyclone geometry so the fine dust also got separated out. Although I had a much better working cyclone as of , it still took me a couple of years to design then build, test, and refine my design into its current configuration.

The following shares some of that process. Although this is probably not that interesting to most, knowing much of this information will make the difference between your having a shop that looks clean and a shop whose air protects your health and the health of those close to you. Rather than cover this information more than once, you can read it over on my web pages.

Some university sites offer cyclone design optimization spreadsheets. To use one of these spreadsheets you need to know the airspeed and air volume we will be working with, the amount of material to be separated, and the sizing of this material.

These cyclone spreadsheet calculators will then compute the overall resistance for each of the different cyclone types along with expected separation efficiency.

Airspeed measured in feet per minute FPM defines what size and weight of chip we can pickup. Because woodworking makes a range of chip sizes we normally pick the airspeed for the largest type of material we use. During normal woodworking we make fairly large chips all the way down to very fine dust particles that are so small they are invisible.

Major blower makers that provide equipment to use air and ducting to transport different types of material provide charts that tell us how much airspeed and the minimum pressures needed to transport various types of material.

For fine wood dust such as created when using fine sandpaper, we only need about 50 FPM airspeed to overcome normal room air currents and move this dust. For typical sawdust we need to move the air at about FPM and for larger chips we need to move the air at about FPM. Ideally we should move right at FPM airspeed for picking up the normal range of wood chips. Many air engineers design instead at FPM because this airspeed is ample to pick up the material most fire marshals consider dangerous.

Air volume measured in cubic feet per minute CFM defines how big of an area we can collect over. In short if we know what air speed we need and the size of the area we need to cover we can compute how many CFM we need. To just collect the same sawdust and chips we would otherwise sweep up with a broom, known as "chip collection", most large stationary small shop tools can use existing hoods and tool ports and get good "chip collection" with about CFM. Tool makers like Fein and Festool have shown us we can get excellent fine dust collection with a big shop vacuum.

To do so our tools must be built from the ground up to totally contain the dust. Unfortunately, most large stationary tools found in small shops are older designs that only have good "chip collection" built in. Air engineers have spent decades figuring out how to fix our older tools to get good fine dust collection.

To collect the fine dust on our typical older tool designs we must upgrade hoods, often provide larger dust collection ports, and provide a bubble of air around the working areas of the tools that pulls in the fine dust. Although that bubble only needs the air moving at 50 FPM and faster to overcome normal room air currents and pull in the fine dust, the size of this bubble is large, almost fifteen inches in every direction.

This large area is bad news because airspeed for sucked air drops at about the same rate as the surface area of a sphere expands meaning about four times Pi times the distance squared. So we need to move lots more air for good fine dust collection than is required for "chip collection".

A moment of thought about how our vacuums work makes this pretty obvious. A vacuum nozzle only picks up right next to the nozzle and just moving a tiny bit away so reduces the airspeed we get no collection. Air engineers calculated the minimum airflows at each size and type of large stationary tool then refined these values over decades of experience to create CFM requirement tables for each size and type of tool.

We need a 7" for the ideal size to carry CFM. If we use an oversized impeller and a little stronger motor we generate enough pressure to let us move this CFM in a 6" diameter duct. Knowing that 6" duct is readily available and inexpensive but larger is not available or readily available, I designed my blower to have enough pressure to move a real CFM in a 6" diameter duct.

Static Pressure is how much overhead we need our blower to overcome to work in our shop. Every length of duct, duct fitting, tool hood, tool port, and filter will add some resistance. This is a well-studied area and we can use a good static calculator such as the one provided on my pages here to get a good working estimate of the lowest and highest potential resistance or static pressure in our system.

That highest resistance is going to be our longest ducting run plus the highest resistance we expect from our filters. Filter resistance will change considerably over the life of a filter. A clean brand-new filter passes the most air and has the least resistance. As a filter gets dirty the resistance goes up. Over time filters "season" meaning they build up a cake of fine dust in the filter pores that does not come out with normal machine shaking type cleaning.

A seasoned filter will often filter ten to twenty times better than a brand-new filter, but it will have a much higher resistance. Filter monitoring is done with a pressure gauge and recording the filter resistance after every cleaning. This fine dust trapped in our filter pores is made up of small sharp particles that will cut and tear their way through the filter matrix. As the filter dirties the air pressure increases forcing these particles through faster speeding up this damage.

Cleaning our filters forces these fine particles through the filter but even faster, so cleaning also quickly breaks down our filters. Filters that get too dirty quickly fail and so do filters that are cleaned too often, plus most small shop woodworkers tend to over clean our filters causing them to fail even faster. This is why most large commercial installations use a pressure gauge and record the air pressure after every cleaning. That pressure will steadily rise as the filter "seasons" then fall off as the filter breaks down.

They must replace filters when the pressure drops too low because the filter is no longer working well. Filter rating is done in a variety of ways, but ASHRAE writes the rules for rating indoor filters designed to protect our health. ASHRAE requires indoor filters to be rated when clean and new which is when they pass the most air and the most fine dust. Otherwise we would be using our lungs to filter the air in the sometimes up to two years it takes a small shop cyclone filter to fully season.

Filter material makers also provide a filter rating that gives the expected level of filtering once the filter is fully seasoned, plus the resistance level for a fully seasoned filter. This resistance level is then used as part of the static calculations used to size the dust collection system. Filter sizing is generally done based on recommendations from the filter makers based upon the fineness of the filter, the amount of airflow and amount of dust to be filtered.

The medical experts recommend we filter wood dust to at least 0. The main filter makers say the 0. The thicker all spun bond material 0.

If you read further the filter material makers further recommend using double the minimum filter area because that will reduce static pressure filter resistance four fold, extend filter life four fold, and reduce cleaning cycles four fold.

Typical small shop dust collectors with bag type filters generally have less than 50 square feet of filter area when with their claimed CFM of airflow actually need about square feet of these spun bond bag type filter area whether in a bag or cartridge.

Most small shop cyclones claim CFM airflow and come with the poly cellulose blended cartridge filters that are typically under square feet in area when they really need a minimum of at least square feet of filter area.

Stock filters supplied by most small shop vendors end up being a mess of confused advertising and performance numbers. Most small shop vendors advertise their filtering level not when clean and new as required by ASHRAE, but instead based on a fully seasoned filtering level which leaves our lungs doing the filtering for sometimes two years and more while the filter seasons. Most size their bag and cartridge filters based on clean and new air resistance which can be one tenth and less the actual working resistance of our filters when they fully season.

This combination ends up with their providing far too small filters that quickly load up killing airflow and soon leaving us with filters that quickly fail and no longer provide us with good fine dust protection. Although this may make for more filter sales, it is not a very good way to care for their customers and invariably ends up using filters with far too much airflow robbing resistance. Fan Tables let us use our calculated high and low resistance levels in combination with our required airflow to choose a blower housing that is the right size, an impeller fan sized to meet our airflow needs, and the right size motor.

Good fan tables also tell us the correct diameter for our blower opening which is also the same size we should use for our ducting main. The good ones like the ESSCO cyclone calculator will show the sizing and estimate the efficiency of each of the major well-known kinds of cyclones. We don't really need a fancy calculator because once we know our ducting size from our fan table we can multiply that by three to get the diameter of our cyclone.

All the major cyclones then use this diameter dimension D to let us compute the sizes for all the other features of our cyclone. Cyclone Efficiency is something that these calculators will predict, but almost all typical woodworking cyclones that we see outside almost every large woodworking facility provide a A micron particle is roughly one third the thickness of a coarse human hair. The woodworking industry considers particles sized under microns to be airborne dust because when blown outside they will quickly dissipate with no trace.

Virtually all woodworking cyclones provide exactly this same micron separation and are designed to simply drop the heavier sawdust and chips into a collection bin while blowing the fine dust away outside. This is also almost exactly the same separation efficiency found in trash can separator lids, except the trashcan separators need huge trashcans at the much larger airflows needed for good fine dust collection.

Cyclones can handle much larger air volumes in a smaller size. Although this micron separation may be ideal efficiency for a woodworking cyclone that blows the fine dust away outside, it is a very poor choice for running our air through fine filters.

The problem is wood dust contains far too much of this fine airborne dust. This dust ends up quickly plugging our filters killing the needed airflow, requiring constant cleaning, and leaves greatly reduced filter lives.

So in conclusion we need a cyclone that minimizes air resistance and maximizes how much of the fine dust it separates. When I did my research, there were no such cyclone designs available for woodworking and no other kinds of cyclones provided the needed airflow and separation efficiencies without using greatly oversized motors and blowers.

Applying what I learned to the available small shop and even most larger facility cyclones showed woodworking fine dust collection is a mess. Only a couple of the largest dust collection vendors that actually certify and regularly test their customer air quality after installing a dust collection system provide good fine dust collection.

Most instead provide cyclones that provide terrible separation, blowers that move far too little air, filters that filter so poorly the air should not be returned indoors, ducting that will not begin to move the airflows shown by decades of air engineering as the minimums needed for good fine dust collection, plus most don't even pay lip service to the key requirement of having to start with upgrading most tool hoods and ports.

This really did not make sense at all until I got deeper into the literature and discovered that dust collection is a strongly contested war between a few well-meaning medical experts versus our fourth largest group of employers in the country.

These folks continue to spend big dollars to purchase the best studies that money can buy which prove woodworking makes no fine dust, the fine dust made by woodworking has no negative health effects, and the exposure levels are so tiny as to be of no importance.

These interests delayed the OSHA air quality standard for woodworking for nearly thirty years and forced this standard to be fifty times easier than recommended by the medical experts. These same interests successfully challenged that easy OSHA standard before it even went fully into effect.

In short, dust collection today for woodworking is almost entirely up to the customers to decide and then trust that the vendors will provide what they claim in their advertising. In small shop dust collection this situation is so dismal that the "best" magazine rated cyclone vendor puts out a cyclone that actually increases our airborne dust level in our shops to far higher than if we just worked with a fan running in an open doorway.

In summary small and large shop dust collection in the U. My personal testing of every major brand and size of small shop dust collector and cyclone found only the 3 hp and larger dust collectors and the 5 hp and larger cyclones moved enough air to even meet the relatively easy OSHA air quality requirements.

I found most small shop cyclones now use portions of my earlier design shared on my Cyclone Modifications web pages, but all continue make serious design compromises to make them easier to build, to use a much less expensive and powerful motor, and to force fit them under an eight-foot-tall ceiling. Not one of these units as of my testing done in provided a cyclone filter that when clean and new provided even micron filtering.

All small shop vendor dust collector and cyclone vendors advertised maximum airflows that were more than double the airflows these systems provided in Shelf Design Woodshop 2020 real use. All small shop dust collector and cyclone filters ranged from five to twenty times too small for their claimed filtering level, and were even too small for their actual filtering levels.

In short, small shop dust collection remains the same dismal mess it was when I got inspired in to come up with better solutions to help small shop workers better protect our health. Every small shop vendor in sold cyclones with serious internal resistance problems that robbed about half the blower airflow, but even with the changes my friends and I came up with, but all other small shop cyclones continue to have such poor airflow, separation and filtering they often build dangerously high amounts of fine dust if vented indoors.

The top magazine recommended cyclone I installed in to protect my health less than two months later landed me in the hospital. The prior design problems coupled with poor separation and bad airflow helped me define what I wanted in a better cyclone. I still wanted a cyclone that protected the blower impeller and filter from material hits. I wanted a unit that still fit under a typical eight foot ceiling that is 96" high.

I wanted this cyclone to provide much better fine dust separation to permit using smaller and more affordable fine filters that quickly get ruined with cyclones that do not provide good separation.

Natural Tung Oil 50ml Woodworking Plans Dollhouse Menu Diy Wood Hand Tools Build Wood Dining Table List