J. Phil Thien's Projects

OOPS, looks like I kinda went off topic.  The Thien separator plate idea I tried didn't work well at all so went back to my previous mod using the lower cone and upper separator plate with the immersion tube.  I showed these pics to demonstrate the original design in case someone modified the DC using the Thien design on this particular DC.  Sorry for any confusion.

Good idea.  I'm attaching four photos I took along with my original build (mod) of my DC.  Today, I added a vortex breaker to the bottom end of the cone which I did not take a picture of - sorry.  Believe it or not, the swirling of the dust in the catch bag has all but stopped.  Too late to give it a torture test but I have a feeling that it might just perform even better.  Comments and suggestions would be welcomed. 

I am a new member on this forum and this is my first post having taken some time to read some threads to get a feel for the members and their interests.  I am a hobby woodworker working in my attached garage at home.  Have recently become interested in improving the quality of dust collection for obvious health reasons not to mention the mess the dust makes.  My first challenge was to modify my Canwood Pro CWD12-750 collector to a simple cyclone design which was somewhat successful but certainly not to the point of being satisfied with the dust and chips collecting in the pleated paper filter instead of the lower bag.  My surfing lead me to Mr Thien's website and design.  Being a design I thought I could work with, I added an upper plate with a chimney and lower slotted separator below the dust inlet tube.  Sadly, the transfer of chips and dust to the upper filter did not improve at all.  It is entirely possible that I did something wrong or the design just won't work on the collector but like I say, it was a challenge.  Has anyone converted the same Canwood collector to the Thien design with success and if so, I would appreciate finding out exactly what was done to make the conversion work.  Any help would be appreciated.  Many thanks.

Just  joined the forum this morning.  I am a hobby woodworking enthusiast and have recently taken up the challenge of modifying my friends and my dust collectors to reduce/eliminate the collection of dust and chips in the upper filter shortening the clean life of the filter and reducing the overall collector capacity.  My first effort was to modify my Canwood 850 CFM unit.  Won't take the time here to tell you what I did but suffice to say that the results were only marginally successful.  My second go was to a Craftex 1250 CFM unit with almost acceptable results.  Realize now that I should have done some research first as there are several examples of mods attempted.  I haven't had the time yet to read the many post on dust collection but will do so before posting or asking too many silly questions.  This forum certainly looks to be very interesting.