Dust Collector

Cyclone

You know how sometimes, you have a big pile of sawdust to suck up, but you don't want to use a broom? How you'll pull out the shop vacuum? And how it'll breeze through the first bit of sawdust, then gradually choke and wheeze?

Even in normal use, a shop vac's filter gradually clogs with fine-grain sawdust. Eventually, the vacuum loses suction. The air filter isn't too hard to clean, but it'd be nice to keep it clean longer.

That's the idea behind dust separators: sawdust and air go into a cyclone. Sawdust is thrown to the outside edge and removed while the clean air exits to the vacuum in the middle.

Dust Sucker

Thien baffle - top view
Imagine air swirling around!

Why would anyone make a vacuum out of wood, you ask? I have no idea. But I'm doing it anyway.

Looking around the internet, I saw that Mattathias, of woodgears.ca, had built a dust collector out of wood. It used a Thien baffle for its filtration, and depended only slightly on filters.

Frustrated with the ever-clogging filters of shop vacs, I've wanted to make a cyclonic separator for a while. When I saw his unit - a quiet, standalone separator, I decided to build one.