Air Filter for vacuum chuck

[Trevor Mills]

Have a Gast vacuum pump and the Oneway kit. Looking for advice on an air filter. Do I need one and what would work best?

[Eric Holmquist]

You do need one on the inlet, you do not want to suck stuff through the works of your vacuum pump and damage it.

The good news is that they are fairly cheap and easy to find. Just take a standard dust filter / moisture trap that you would use on a compressor and hook it up backwards. The airflow from a compressor is away from the machine, while the airflow on a vacuum pump is towards the machine. Hook up the filter so that air flows through it as designed. These filters often have some arrow on them indicating direction of airflow.

It can also be helpful to have a muffler on the output of the vacuum pump. This are also pretty simple, typically a sintered brass plug that really quiets it down and help prevent stuff from falling into the exhaust port. Without this, you may not notice if a pile of shavings lands on the pump and some of it falls inside.

[Tony Pridmore]

http://www.surpluscenter.com/item.asp?item=4-1565&catname=air

Eric's point about the muffler is good advice. You can use a second filter or, as Eric suggested, something like this: http://www.surpluscenter.com/item.asp?item=4-1826&catname=air

[Chip Sutherland]

In my post Vacuum Pump Project from earlier today, I have both a muffler and an inline filter on my rotary piston pump. It is a filter typically used on small compressors. I just reposted the pics. The muffler is in the 1st pic the inline filter is the second pic.

[Doug Wolf]

255893Just put a fuel filter inline to your pump inlet. You can see through them to see if they are plugging up with sawdust and/or debris. They are less than $3.00 at Wal-Mart.

[Trevor Mills]

Thanks Everybody,
You saved me a lot of head scratching and its much appreciated.
Trevor