Top Hat with Adjustable Height.

[BernardNaish]

It occurred to me that if anyone wanted to experiment with top hat designs perhaps they could make one like this.

Make a Top Hat the same way, or as close as you can get to retired2:

http://www.jpthien.com/smf/index.php?topic=563.0

Leave the top, bottom and retaining ring plates square, instead of cutting their outside edges into circles. Fit spacers between the top plate and the retaining plate and seal them to the walls with silicone caulk. The baffle; bottom plate and the retaining plate can now be bolted together without glue and the outside edges of the plates sealed with tape.

The bottom plate can be removed at any time to get at the baffle & play with changes to the slot. You can add spacer plates between the baffle plate and the retainer plate and bolt them together again. The spacer plates can be made from different thickness's of MDF sheets and stacked up to give ¼" increases in height as tall as you like but perhaps 6" is enough as this gives a double height chamber.

You can now adjust the chamber height, slot characteristics and the distance of the bell end from the baffle. Perhaps you could measure motor amps, air flow, noise level and collection efficiency. This means the difference between the weight of input debris and the weight of debris recovered from the drop bin. Electronic kitchen scales should be sensitive enough even if the test dust has to be weighed in batches to get enough to show the difference.

There are no guarantees that we would get the same results as each other for the same test conditions but we might get some ideas.

I apologise for not trying to make one of these even though I am pretty sure they would work. I just do not have the time or resources.