The Frankencyclone - Converting a DC to a cyclone on the cheap

[Mathieu Beauregard]

As its names suggest, my Frankencyclone is a mix of parts from several past failed projects, put together in a not to elegant way. The odd thing is, it works amazingly well !

As a dust collector retrofitting solution, its a lot cheaper than Oneida's "Pod" dust collector retrofit unit and certainly a lot more efficient than all the "canister" type retrofit.

Keep in mind this is a hack and its nowhere close to the performance of a real cyclone like the ClearVue, but for 50$ (plus the price of the filter), I believe its a decent interim solution.

Basically, this is a push-through design using a 2HP / 12 inch impeller.

Here it is (its in a small room so I had to take multiple pictures):







I must thank Bill Pentz for his incredible dedication to the subject of dust collection in woodworking. The amount of quality information found on his site, his sound scientific approach and his willingness to share all of this information for free with everybody is extraordinary.

I would have gladly paid for books with this kind of content in them. So I sent him an equivalent paypal donation to help with the maintenance of his site.

That being said, I hope he won't be too insulted by my liberal butchering of his design

You can find more pictures and detailed information on this page:

http://pages.videotron.com/guizzmo/cyclone/index.html

[Kyle Kraft]

That's great!!! I'm all about low dough solutions to problems. Improvise, adapt, and overcome.

[Jim Kirkpatrick]

Matty, Any relation to MacGyver? Looks great!

[Travis Gauger]

Very nice job. I love the home grown solutions. Have a few of those myself. Here are a few pictures of mine. 4" in and out, Aluminum flashine for construction. I built mine to prove out the design before investing into heavier gauge material, etc. This one worked great till I closed all my blastgates and colapsed it. You can read about it here. http://www.sawmillcreek.org/showthread.php?t=77661

[Mathieu Beauregard]

Sorry for the collapsed cyclone Travis. It's unfortunate as it looked very good.

It's one of the reasons I opted for a "push through" design. It allowed me to use cheap (and easy to work with) 30 gauge sheet metal with no risk of collapsing. It also allowed for plastic bags instead of custom trashcan for dust pickup.

[David Giles]

A great compromise between cheap, fast and good! One of the things that I've learned about the "push through" blowers is they will handle screws, dirt, leaves and wood chips with some noise, but that paper towels will wrap around wheel and cause noticeable vibration!

Great job for $50!

[Travis Gauger]

Sorry for the collapsed cyclone Travis. It's unfortunate as it looked very good.

It's one of the reasons I opted for a "push through" design. It allowed me to use cheap (and easy to work with) 30 gauge sheet metal with no risk of collapsing. It also allowed for plastic bags instead of custom trashcan for dust pickup.

Yeah, well it really worked good till I closed that last blastgate. Opps. So I like your idea a lot. I still have about 30' left on that 50' roll of aluminum I used for the first one. I think it would hold up good with the push through design. I think I'm smelling a phase II around the corner.

[Curt Harms]

I've thought about that in conjunction with a standard DC. Mount the cyclone where the filter goes now and mount the filter remotely. I asked the guy that sells cyclones on Ebay about that and he said his cyclones wouldn't work as push thru, they needed the blower after the cyclone. Oh well. It's great to hear yours works well.

Curt

[Jack Porter]

great job, I finished a similar project about 4 weeks ago. I pulled part my grizzly G1029Z and built a pulle through similar to the one in wood magazine for about 80 bucks. I used 24ga sheet, it was a little tough to handle and bend, but a few pvc pipes and rolling paid off.