I made a Dust Collector – Part 3

So… I may owe some level of explanation for waiting a year between my last post and this one…

Maybe.

I made a housing for my impeller by arranging several blocks of red oak on a piece of plywood and then tracing the perimeter of my impeller onto the blocks of wood.

I appear to have lost any photographic record of this step, so please view the following for reference:
  I then cut this line on each piece using my bandsaw. I rearranged the cut blocks so that they made the correct shape and then screwed them on to the piece of plywood. i also smeared from Bond-O on to the inside circumference to smooth out inconsistencies and plug any gaps.  I drilled a large hole into the center of the plywood to pass the motor through and made a little platform for the motor to rest on.

After cutting a hole in the front piece, I slapped everything together for another test. It Sucked. But not as much as I hoped. I sat and pondered. and then got distracted. For a year. At some point during that year, I realized why my dust collected only sucked a little, but still waited a number of months before doing anything about it. Let’s play a fun game: Can you figure out what was wrong with my dust collector?
=== SPOILER ALERT! ===
The impeller is spinning the wrong way. To make matters worse, the motor is unambiguously non reversible.
So I immediately (when I felt like it) got to work. I decided to solve the problem by moving the motor around to the “front” of the assembly. This also meant that I needed to keep the impeller in the same orientation relative to the housing, and so I needed to turn the back of the impeller into the front and re-mount it on the motor shaft:



Easy peasy. I powered it up for a test run, and promptly woke my son up (I have a son, he’s almost 2 and he was asleep).

Needless to say, it was louder than I hoped.

I had recalled Wandel doing some testing around making his impeller design quieter and subsequently much, much louder to make an air raid siren. So I scoured his website and failed to find the article I was looking for, but did find a comment of his on someone else’s dust collector design where he noted that “the smaller the gap between the impeller and the housing, the louder it will be.”

So I shaved 1/4″ off the perimeter of my impeller using my bandsaw and put everything back together.

Then I waited until my son was asleep again (for maximum effect) and tested it again.
This time it REALLY sucked. And it did so very quietly. Almost Dust-Sniper quiet!

And so I set in a corner of my garage until I get time to mount and duct it.

Next June is looking promising…

I made a Dust Collector – Part 2

Curse you Wandel, for stealing my thunder!

Whatever. Nobody cares about your little website anyways.

 

So, at this stage of the project I had an impeller and a motor, and nothing in between.

I needed something in between.

Fortunately, my motor came with a pulley attached.

 

…Very securely attached…

I cobbled together a gear puller with some scrap metal, clamps, a magnet, and a coupling nut.

 

Now that I had removed the pulley from the shaft, I proceeded to remove the coupling nut from the pulley…

 

 

Over at the lathe, I began to cut away at the pulley to turn it into a hub.

 

Aaaaaaand, it’s a hub.

 

I laid it on the center of the back of the impeller and marked the locations of the  holes I had drilled in the hub since the last picture…

Off camera, I drilled out the holes and attached the hub to the impeller and the motor shaft.

I hooked it up to a foot pedal switch and it was time for a test!

 

Holy crap! Time to change my underpants!

 

…to be continued.

I made a Dust Collector – Part 1

A while back I bought a leaky air compressor for $50 because it had a good 3HP motor on it that I figured I could use someday for something, probably.

When Mr. Wendel built a small dust collector with a tile saw motor, I knew my old motor had found its destiny.

Little did I know that this would lead to one of the scariest things I have ever built (and I’ve made a good number of catapults and potato cannons in my day).

I needed to make three things: an impeller, a cowl, and a motor mount.

Everything I needed I already had laying around, so I figured this would be a good way to use my tools and my time. At the very least it would be an educational experience.

First: Thing 1 – Impeller

To start, I cut some 1/4″ plywood into two identical discs by taping two squares together with double-sided tape and then spinning them across the blade on a screw I had driven through a thicker board (a rudimentary form of a dedicated circle-cutting jig)

A piece of oak I had in my scrap bin became the impeller fins. I printed out a template and glued it to the piece of wood and then cut out the pieces freehand on my bandsaw.

Since this was a remnant piece of wood, it was not the same thickness all the way through, so I removed some wood from the top of each fin after setting it against the bottom of my milling machine vice to ensure that they were all the same height.

Using 9 fins, the math was easy, I placed a fin every 40-degrees around the bottom disc. The tilt was determined based on what looked best to me, then I just measured the offset from the 40-degree lines and placed the tip of the fin on one line and base of the fin on the other.

After setting everything in place dry and ensuring in all aligned properly, I applied glue to the top and bottom surfaces, set them in their pre-determined places around the bottom disc, and then set the second disc on top.

I didn’t want to mess with clamps, so I set the assembly on a known flat surface (my table saw) and set another known flat surface on top (yes, that’s the table top from the old scroll saw) and piled some heavy metal pieces on that.

After letting the glue set overnight, I took the assembled impeller to the drill press, where I used a 4-inch hole saw to open one side as the air inlet.

Next I set a large ball bearing on top of a metal cylinder in the vise and balanced the impeller on top of it.

I used a forstner bit to remove wood from the heavy side until the impeller stayed level while balanced on the bearing.

So, now I had the impeller… part 1 complete.

Copy/Paste DIY

Anyone who has written a program or designed a web page knows the value of copy/paste.

Hours upon hours can be saved by a Google search and Ctrl+c Ctrl+v.

Some people say that this behavior dampens the imagination, and emphasizes productivity over effort and ingenuity.

I say “So What?”

If I hit a problem that someone else has solved, why should I reinvent the wheel?

And say what you will about this approach, it makes me more efficient and effective, whether or not I generate the solution myself.

It’s not much of a stretch for me to apply this to me projects in the garage.

Often times it is faster and cheaper (believe it or not) to find parts in a commercial product that solves your needs, rather than buying individual parts or making them yourself.

For example: my Moxon vise. Rather than sourcing ACME threads and nuts that would meet my needs, I find a cheap tool that already used these parts (a C-Clamp) and re-purposed them. A reader suggested that threaded dumbbell handles could meet the same need, and this also seems like a fantastic idea. Both of these solutions are significantly cheaper than buying the “correct” components.

While it’s true that this is not a perfect fit for my programming analogy, the lesson is the same: If somebody else is making it possible for you to save time and/or money, why not take advantage of it?

Other examples of this are:

• Bass guitar machine heads = cheap small worm gears
• Variable speed cordless drill = DC gear motor, battery+charger, keyless chuck, and a DC speed controller
• Craigslist air compressor = Heavy duty AC motor
• Craigslist treadmill = Powerful DC motor with power supply and speed controller

These are a few ideas I’ve come up with (or copied), you’re welcome to share in the comments if you have others.

Things to Look Forward to…

Another year is officially over. Moving on.

I haven’t managed to take the time to actually write a post in a while, but I thought I’d take a moment to give a visual hint of things to come…

I Made A Ladder!

Yes, I did.

Please note that I did not title this post “how to make a ladder”.

This was for my daughter’s play set in the back yard, which has had my 6-foot stepladder leaning against it for a few weeks now.

I started by leaning a 6-foot length of redwood against the play set to figure out what angle the ladder should lean at.

This was close enough to 30-degrees, so I used 30 as my number.
I cut two lengths of redwood to length with matching 30-degree cuts on the top and bottom edges.

Then I used a tape measure to mark intervals on both pieces to note where the center of each step should be.

I used the table saw and the miter gauge to cut slots at 30-degrees to make the edges of a mortise; and then used a router to freehand cut the insides out (working carefully, the kirf of the table saw cut is enough of a buffer to rout this out freehand).

Since I’m not very good at measuring, the mortises were all too narrow, so I slapped together a little tenoning jig to trim the ends of the steps (this was easier than trying to cut all the mortises a little wider).

I successfully got all the steps installed on one rail of the ladder (glue and screws), and then realized that I was not going to be able to get all of the tenons to line up on the other rail. There were little imperfections in the wood and construction, and all together across all the steps this was enough to make it impossible to line everything up at once.

So I made a little router jig (read: “I cut a piece of plywood”) to shave a little more wood off each tenon’s width (the tricky part is that the steps were already installed on one side).

Meanwhile I was doing a lot of stepping over and around the half-assembled ladder and managed to catch the corner of a step with the underside of my knee…

REALLY?!?! Not only am I supposed to wear “close-toed shoes” in the garage, but now I have to wear pants too?!

Next you’re going to say I should be wearing gloves!

Whatever.

In any case, that last bit of adjusting with the router worked, and I finished the ladder… and then put on some pants and ate dinner.

Fixing a Fancy Bolt

When I first started using my lathe, I noticed that one of the two small bolts that secured the compound to the cross slide was stripped, and couldn’t be tightened down fully.

But since the other one worked and the compound seemed stable, I postponed the replacement of this bolt.

Recently I had been using my lathe for a lot of stainless steel parts, and the added strain of the harder metal took a toll on the remaining bolt; to the point that, when I tried to tighten it down the other day, it also stripped.

I could procrastinate no longer, I had to fix this thing.

The problem was that the heads of these bolts was a semi-rounded T-bolt and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to find a replacement part easily. Plus I wanted to use my lathe NOW, not wait for shipping.

So I decided to recycle the bolt heads.

Here’s how it went:

First I took the nuts from the bolts and dug through one of the spare parts bins to find a machine screw with the same thread size and diameter.

After this was accomplished, I bashed my knuckle.

Then I place the old bolt shafts in the lathe and drilled the head off after center-drilling and countersinking it.

Next I worked the new screws with a file in my lathe until they fit the countersunk hole nicely.

After I was satisfied with the fit of the heads, I brought them flush on the milling machine.

Then I took them over to the welder and glopped a Cheerio of molten metal on top. This didn’t have to be a very strong weld, just enough to keep the machine screw head from spinning in the T-bolt head.

I used the milling machine again for cleanup, and once I trimmed the bolts to length, I was back in business.

Adding Cheap And Classy Storage To Your Shop

If your garage is like mine, it’s a mess.

Periodically you spend a weekend cleaning up; cramming your tools and scraps each into their respective spots (or wherever they will fit), and sweeping up the sawdust and shavings, leaving your shop spotless… until you start your next project.

At that point you dislodge a tool and the materials necessary to complete your project, and you may has well have just pulled the pin on a grenade.

A short time later your garage explodes in a flurry of tools and shrapnel, that leaves your garage as bad as it has ever been, and quite possibly worse, while it waits for another free weekend to be cleaned up.

Making matters worse, I have many times promised to get the garage clean enough for my wife to park her car, but I have thus far been unable to maintain the upper hand for long enough to actually pull the car into its place.

After extensive study of this phenomenon, I started to study the root cause. Surely this is not merely a symptom of being a lazy slob. Surely this is not merely my own fault….

…surely…

Thus, having ruled out personal flaws, I decided that the heart of the problem was simple: Storage.

I had some wire shelves, a rolling toolbox, a workbench, a hanging shelf, and a pegboard, but every tool I owned and used was living in increasingly cramped quarters, and there were some obvious opportunities to add enough space to get a little more capacity and flexibility in the storage system.

The first and largest opportunity: my metal working station.

When I designed my metal working station, I left large openings with the intention of someday building drawers and shelves.

About a week ago I realized I was never going to find it worthwhile to spend a day building a bunch of drawers while I had a backlog of so many more important/interesting projects (swingset, porch lights, shed, small truck for my daughter, speargun, radius cutter for my lathe… and whatever else comes up between now and the finish of those).

What if I just bought some drawers?

At first I thought I thought I’d use a coupon to buy a couple Harbor Freight toolboxes, since they are so much cheaper than anything equivalent from Sears or Home Depot, but I’ would have still ended up spending a few hundred dollars.

What should I do?

Begin theme music! …Possibly after advertisement!

<Note: Please leave this playing while reading the remainder of this article>

Enter the Swedes, stage left!

IKEA TO THE RESCUE!

Granted, there’s still a lot of cleanup to do, but I have now added more than enough storage for all of my metal working tools and work pieces.

And at a total of $100, it costed me less than I would have spent on the plywood and drawer slides to make the drawers that I would have never taken the time to build.

Those clever Swedes.

Lathe Boring Bar Holder

I find boring bars exciting.

I have a boring head for my milling machine, which is excellent (indispensable) for milling holes to a certain diameter in square stock. But for round stock in my lathe I’ve been messing around with various cutters with mixed results while trying to cut the inner diameter of various projects.

Boring bars are the correct tool for the job on a lathe, but I don’t have any. Even if I did, I don’t have a holder.

I decided to rectify this situation by making a holder that would accept the cutters from my boring head set.

When I made my quick-change tool post, I milled a dovetail into a large block of steel. The idea is that I can cut off chunks as needed to make various tool holders without having to mill a new dovetail.

I sliced off a chunk with my portable bandsaw, cleaned up the shavings, and then milled it down to a more appropriate size.

I drilled a starter hole  in one end and through the full length of the workpiece.

Then I used my boring head to bring the diameter to fit the boring bars’ 1/2-inch shanks snugly.

In order to check by progress while boring the hole, I had to move the workpiece out from under the cutter and fit some calipers into the hole. My DRO proved very helpful for this: I could set the axis to 0, move the table to get the workpiece to a measurable location, and then  move it back till the DRO read 0 again. It perfectly relocated the hole under the boring head every time.

Once I had bored out the hole to the proper depth and diameter,

I set the workpiece on its side and drilled 2 holes through to the 1/2-inch hole, which I then tapped out with 1/4-20  threads for set screws (i once again use the DRO to relocate the holes after changing the drill bit out for the thread tap)

In order to tap the threads perfectly straight, I like to lock the tap in the drill chuck, and then use my lathe chuck handle to turn the chuck manually.
Done!

I slapped the new boring bar holder on my lathe and bored out the inside of a couple of my lathe feed gears as an inaugural project. The boring bar performed perfectly in its new holder.

I win.

…and now for something completely different

If you look at my history of posting topics, this one is completely uncharacteristic. However, if you think of my postings as showing off something I did that I’m proud of, this fits right in.

My sister got married last week. I was supposed to give a toast, but her other older brothers and I decided to surprise her (and the groom) with a song instead…