Shop vac on crack!

[bennybmn]

OK so I got bored... And I've had an urge to make a separator, but I don't really have the room for one on my DC right now (and I have a baffle in it...).  The recent thread about using  vertical space efficiently got me thinking about integrating a baffle into my shop vac. Plus I was thinking of using it for my sanders etc, and I want it to work as well as possible!

Here's what I came up with.



It started with finding some sort of material I could bend into a cylinder easily... I found a sheet of this faux leather finish in the panneling section at the borg. It was 5 bucks... Couldn't resist :D  Then I laid everything out.  I needed height for the baffle, the inlet, the thickness of the divider/lid, and then room for the filter, which is BIG. Honestly it takes up most of the 12 gallon capacity... Dust bags helped, but weren't perfect. 

So I cut the baffle and the lid, I used a short length of mailing tube, the stuff Rockler T track comes in, instead of PVC.



Then I used a chalk line to lay out where they were gonna go. Don't have a straight edge long enough!!



Setup the baffle and lid with a dowel spacer which I left in, and another spacer which I took out once it was assembled.



Then I started rolling and screwing...



Used some ratchet straps to pull it in.





Here's the inlet strapped in. I used expanding foam to seal it A: because I had some, and 2: because I cut the hole too big... Seems to be working fine. The connector is a little coupler that came with the muffler I got for it, I think at Home Depot...



This does bring up the neutral vane thing again... I purposely had the inlet tube extend into the body of the vac, as opposed to trimming it flush.  Thoughts?

So here's the results after vacuuming up my floor and the inside of my router table cabinet...

Nothing on top...



Here's the tub!



Added bonus, I can actually intake 12 gallons of crap now, as opposed to 12 gallons minus the room the filter takes up! Plus it's completely reversible. If I want to use it to suck up water, I just pull out the whole middle thing, un-cap the stock inlet, and go nuts.

As you can see it nearly doubled the height of my vac!! But it still wheels around pretty easily, especially since the hose is attached low, so it doesn't try to tip it over.

Thanks for all the ideas guys, and thanks for lookin!

[shrxfn]

Looks like a pimped out R2D2. ;D Good job Benny way to think outide the box.

[bennybmn]

Dude awesome star wars observation. I should look into making it MORE like R2D2 :D

[shrxfn]

Paint it white with some blue pinstriping and a 10x loupe and you are looking at copyright infringement beware of Lucasfilm. Next up a DC that would look like C3P0.

[Vaughn]

Nicely done, Benny. Do you think the filter mount could have been modified to accept a shorter filter? (That might cause a hit in airflow, though.) You've got me thinking, though...dangerous thing. Right now I have a shop vac and separate 5 gallon non-Thien separator, both on wheels and always in the way. It'd make sense to save floor space by going vertical and incorporating a real separator in the process.

[bennybmn]

Yeah ya know it is a HUGE space for that filter, but on the other hand I get all that space BACK in the form of more room in the barrel. Think of how soon crap would be filling up into the filter area normally?!? The vac is a little weird to begin with. It's basically the same head unit as the 16 gallon vac, on a 12 gallon bin, ya know?

Wrapping that material into a cylinder was a bit of a pain, and sealing it with the foam weather strip was a bit annoying too... If anyone has ideas for a different material that might be easier to work with, I'm open to suggestions! I could re-use the baffle and everything and make a better can for it.

Also, is the general concencus that having the inlet pipe go all the way into the can a good thing?

[dbhost]

This is not the shop vac we are looking for..

Move along!