Another Thien Bucket Baffle - 95% Efficient

[Mike Goetzke]

I had great success applying a Thien baffle to my Jet dust collector. I have been using a Eurekazone rail cutting system which uses a circular saw. I had been using a Ridgid shop vac then bought a Festool CT-33 thanks to MS cashback, but, the bags just fill up too fast. I was thinking of buying a Dust Deputy but then thought about a Thien bucket. I had a 10 or 12 gal. chlorine bucket (free) and added two fittings ($3) by drilling two 2" holes with a Forstner bit. I glued them in place with some JB weld. I just made the baffle out of a piece of styrofoam I had laying around that I made to fit tight at the proper depth. I was worried about the stiffening ribs in the lid but below results show they didn't hurt the performance. Oh, plus I didn't use a seal on the lid - I just twist locked the lid like you do to re-seal it with chlorine:






I didn't have too much dust to try it out on - just what was in my CT-33's bag. It was 14.3 oz. of dust, mostly fine sanding dust:



I weighed the Festool dust bag before/after and the dust from the bucket and all that got to the bag was 0.75 oz.. This makes it about 95% efficient! This is going to reduce my bag changes significantly.


Help/suggestions needed. I like the styrofoam insert but even though I formed it to a sharp edge I still got dust stuck on the edge (I looked closer at this photo - ends up the dust stuck to the edge ended up being a piece of electrical tape:




Thanks,

Mike