Vacuum shoe

[Bryan Rocker]

I have been contemplating the flow of air in and our of a laser engraver. For CNC routers, we put a dust collector shoe and vacuum it up there. Why do we not do the same thing for a laser???

Questioning minds want to know :)

Bryan

[Scott Shepherd]

Because our laser is pushing 5G's and we don't want the weight slowing us down?

[Robert Bonenfant]

A Router is throwing wood chips and fine dust directly into the air - Bad for your health and makes a huge mess in shops across the world. Dust shoes and dust collectors prevent this and helps solve this problem. A Laser uses a exhaust systems in a similar way, a high powered blower pulls any smoke, debris, harmful particles directly out of the laser case and sends it outside. No need to add a dust shoe to a machine that doesn't have a problem with dust. Dust collectors will suck up the dust, but they also have to filter the air and push it back out- Laser Exhaust has very fine particles and smoke, this would clog a dust filter very quickly.

[Bryan Rocker]

The collection of the saw dust, chips and the dangerous superfines are usually captured by some sort of cyclone device before it gets to the dust collector filter, thus allowing it to be vented inside. Could a cyclone be used to capture the superfines of a laser engraver?

[Matt McCoy]

I think Steve hit the nail on the head. You would be adding a lot of mass to the gantry that the motors, belts, PS, etc. are not designed for. Plus stuffing the length of hose to cover the whole bed into an enclosed machine would be another engineering consideration.

[Jerome Stanek]

I have been contemplating the flow of air in and our of a laser engraver. For CNC routers, we put a dust collector shoe and vacuum it up there. Why do we not do the same thing for a laser???

Questioning minds want to know :)

Bryan

For one thing you don't want smoke and dust coming up past your lens and mirrors. A good laser will be able to suck that stuff down and out with no trouble.

[Robert Bonenfant]

Bryan visit youtube and you can see a video of how a cyclone dust collector works. The dust is thrown around in a cylinder and the heavy particles fall into the main bin (Chips), the lighter (Dangerous Particles) are sent into the filter chamber. Some of the dust will fall into the filter bin and most of it will get caught in the final filter before the air is pushed back into the room. We have two large Cyclone Collectors and have to clean the fillers daily with a compressed air or the systems performances starts to degrade rapidly.

[Bryan Rocker]

What brand of cyclones do you have? I have followed the dust collection threads on here for a long time including the Thein one. Most of them deposit almost all of them in the cyclone. Not much if any gets to the filters.

[Robert Bonenfant]

We just upgraded to a new Oneida system (Made in the USA:) ) So we could setup all of our tools and Routers on one dust collector (Hopefully Saving us some money). We used a Laguna Cyclone and two jet cyclones for our Cnc's and other shop tools.
Ill try to take a quick snap shot before we empty it tomorrow afternoon to show the bin's contents.

Visit Oneida and check out any of there models (industrial Section) - They all have huge cyclones that drop into a 50 gallon drum - Then if you look on the side of them, they have several air filters with small bins attached to them. The 50 gallon drums take the wood chips and heavy particles (Bulk of the Dust Created) and the light particles (Small Harmful Particles) are forced into the filter, The filters prevents the small particles from leaving the system and the fine dust sticks to the inside of the filters (Preventing its escape). Most Small to medium Cyclone units work this way - I cant speak for the huge 50 - 350 hp systems way out of my price range and most others (Only seen a handful of these in my life)

We had to empty our old system several times a day and there was a clear difference between the drum and the bag attached to the filter (Super Fine Dust)
Still don't believe me visit your local tool store and they can give you a demo :D

https://www.oneida-air.com/inventoryD.asp?item_no=XXK200300&CatId={E2D6BE6D-A9B1-4F95-A716-44521A11896C}

[Bryan Rocker]

If I am up in the the neighborhood I may just have to stop by and say Hi to a fellow creeker, I believe what your saying :)

I just finished looking at that link, my that is a hog of a system you have there!

[Lee DeRaud]

For one thing you don't want smoke and dust coming up past your lens and mirrors. A good laser will be able to suck that stuff down and out with no trouble.That's the main reason, IMHO. The airflow in a CNC's dust/chip collection system runs the wrong direction relative to the head. Of course another way of looking at it is that the "vacuum shoe" of a laser is the entire bed.

(Trying to plumb the thing to coexist peacefully with air-assist sounds like a really fun project...or not.)