Dust Collector - post upgrade
I finally hooked up the dust collector and the machines are now connected. I am still working on the arts and craft bed series and had to mill some board for the mattress support, which was the best excuse to test out the setup.
Barrel
I wanted an easy way to collect the debris once the barrel was full, but found that the bags that oneida sells is a bit expensive for me. Was looking for alternative but could not find easily bags big enough.
I remembered that I had some vapour barrier from previous project ins the home and taught this might be a good idea. Well, it might but the bucket really needs the liner that Oneida sells or something similar so that the bag (or other sort of bag) to keep it from being sucked up close to the lid and block the chips/dust from getting into the bucket.
I started to suspect something was wrong based on the sound coming from the dust collector while I was jointing boards. I was on the second board until I decided go take a look. Well, as suspected, it backed out as if the drum was really full and the filter got most of it.
So had to clean the filter and the bucket and removed the plastic from the bucket and went on operating without the anything in the bucket to easily take out when full or close to. This is still pending as to what I will consider as a good solution to easily dispose of the collected chips/dust.
Performance of the dust collector
Once this little mishap cleared out, I went on and continued with rough milling the stock and the collection per say was pretty good at the jointer. The jointer is pretty much the tool that is the closest to the dust collector so was not expecting very bad result.
I also had the chance to slice up some small strips on the band saw and this is where I saw a pretty good difference in suction. I have no tool to verify anything really from a velocity or com, but I could see that a lot more was sucked from the port right under the band saw table. I also saw that the port for the under cabinet was cleaner then in the past.
After a bit of use, I was able to do a visual inspection of the filter and it was pretty clean. Passed a bit of compressed air and the little container at the bottom was empty of dust. Ian really impressed of the separation that the cyclone does as I was able to throw a good mix of finer dust (from the resaw at the band saw) and larger chips from the rough miller (both jointer and planer).
All in all, I think that the upgrade was worth while, specially on the separation to keep the dust in the bucket and not go into the filter. The biggest complaint I had was the cleaning of the cartridge filter I had on the stock version of the dust collector.
Now only to fix how to easily dispose of the waste. This will be the next phase of this project and complete the hanging of the filter in it's permanent place.
Here are other articles about rebuilding my dust collector :
Dust Collector - Supporting Structure
Dust Collector - Up and Running