One of my favorite YouTubers made a video about his project to make a centrifugal dust separator for his woodshop. It's a clone of this Harvey dust collection system which, as of the time of this writing, retails for almost $2800US. Naturally, I had to try to make my own.
I sized it to fit inside 4" PVC instead of the 6" diameter acrylic tube he used. I don't care about seeing the dust swirl inside and I wasn't about to spend $150 on the tube, either.
Operation is pretty simple.
Overall airflow is in the direction of the yellow arrow. Lighter dust follows the orange arrow and is spun up by the turbine (which does not actually spin, important to note), causing it to be flung to the outside of the pipe. Heavier dust can't make the corner around the initial stage, causing it to be dumped into the first stage collection bin.
At first, I was using a couple of 5-gallon buckets as the collection reservoirs, and a battery powered Ryobi shop vac to do the air movement. That worked okay, but the battery depleted fast and the suction wasn't all that powerful. So my Mk II dust collection cart uses a leaf blower from Harbor Freight for suction, and a couple of large boxes with neoprene weather stripping around the rim for collection. The whole thing is on wheels so it can be moved to the tool. I used a couple of ratcheting tie down straps to hold the collector in place and caulked around the junction between the box and the collector for air tightness. In this pic, the leaf blower is dumping into the bag it came with; I found pretty rapidly that the bag is not even kind of a filter, so I replaced it with a PowerTec dust collection bag from Amazon.
It seems to be working really well. Basically no sawdust is making it to the collection bag, just really fine particles that haven't started to build up at all yet. It's loud, but not as loud as I'd feared.
The next step is to increase the diameter of the hose from the collector to the tool end, but that's going to require some fiddling with reducers at the tools. Right now, I'm using the hose from the Ryobi shop vac, and that fits directly on all the tools with little to no modification in most cases.
If you're interested in building your own version, I can supply 3d printable files for the inner parts and a SketchUp model of the cart build. A note on cart construction: I used OSB, but you could just as easily use plywood or even dimensional lumber. I chose OSB mostly based on cost, and I would do it again.
A few weeks ago, I purchased 10 Atmega328P's from Mouser , naively thinking it would be easy enough to get them working on a breadboard as an Arduino sans the fancy (expensive) board. I was planning to use an FTDI USB to TTL serial data cable to bootload (I bought a 5V one, then realized that the two 3.3V ones I already had would work fine- lesson one of this saga). I also bought a some 16MHz crystals and the appropriate capacitors. At this point, I want to extend my thanks to whomever it was that decided a 6-pin AVRISP compatible ICSP header would be a value-add to the Arduino. I know that 95% of the Arduino users out there will NEVER use it, but I am very grateful. So, first hurdle- I figure I'll take one of the 328s and upgrade my Arduino (it was one of the, what, six? Duemilanove's that shipped with a 168 from the factory). Supposedly, the Arduino IDE has the capability of loading the bootloader onto a blank chip through an AVRISP, but I'll be buggered if I co
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