Who first came up with the side inlet tophat design?

[kayak]

Just curious about the beginning and evolution of the tophat design.

[retired2]

Just curious about the beginning and evolution of the tophat design.

I've been hanging out here for quite a while, and it certainly predates me.  Phil might have an answer, but if I had to guess, I would say it was actually the dust collecter manufacturers.  They did not employ Phil's baffle, but many of them used a tangential inlet to a round separator body that employed centrifugal force and various internal baffles to separate the waste.

The first stage of the "top hat" evolution was probably the modification of these bodies to include the Thien baffle, and the next stage came when someone who did not have a DC body to work with started to build one of their own.  If this forum still contained every post from it's inception (don't know if it does), you might be able to find who was "first" in each of these stages by reading the old posts..

[kayak]

Thank you for the response, R2.  I guess what I'm looking for is the first person who built their own pre-separator side-inlet Thien tophat, regardless of whether they constructed the tophat from scratch or used a collector ring cannibalized off of a dust collector.  I also wonder who first used a clear sidewall on the tophat.

[phil (admin)]

Thank you for the response, R2.  I guess what I'm looking for is the first person who built their own pre-separator side-inlet Thien tophat, regardless of whether they constructed the tophat from scratch or used a collector ring cannibalized off of a dust collector.  I also wonder who first used a clear sidewall on the tophat.

May I ask why you want that information?  You can feel free to PM me.

[kayak]

Phil, PM sent.

[phil (admin)]

To the best of my knowledge, the first person to use the "top hat" name goes by variations of the name junquecol:

http://www.ncwoodworker.net/forums/showthread.php?t=52913&highlight=thien+top+hat

Others before him used DC rings.

My recollection was that we saw DC rings being used first, then junquecol basically made a ring and called it a top-hat, and then from that point on we saw more people duplicating junquecol's efforts and fewer rings being used (although many still use rings).

There really isn't a history of development, though.  Lots of parallel stuff going on.

[BernardNaish]

Yes a lot of parallel work. For example I made a separator using a rectangular, tangential side inlet from a dustbin (trash can) about eight years ago. This worked very well when used with a shop vac but not with a DC when we bought one. Then I did a search and found out about the Thien baffle and problem solved. I have yet to make my tophat, possibly because my lash up works well enough.