Converting leaf blower into shop vac/dust collector - not worthy - don't do it!!!
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ต.ค. 2020
- My shop vac stopped working a few days ago and I opened it up to check what's wrong. The problem is more likely the motor got burnt. I saw that the impeller of the shop vac is very small and thought that it's not very efficient. I decided to fix the shop vac using a leaf blower that seems to be able to move a lot of air.
First attempt, I just made a adapter to install the leaf blower on top of the shop vac but it seemed that the leaf blower is only design to move air. When reduce the air intake port buy using a small hose (original hose of the shop vac), the airflow reduced tremendously and the suction wasn't great at all. The new shop vac barely picked up any dust.
I uninstalled the leaf blower and check its impeller and it turned out that the impeller of the leaf blower has 2 halves. The first half is to move air from underneath to the output hose. The second half is to move air from the top to the hose that also helped to cool down the motor. This impeller is not dedicated for vacuum.
I redesigned the impeller and made one. The first test of the impeller wasn't very successful, one of the pane broke off and hit the side of the leaf blower, made a hole on the shell. I had to use my TIG welder to weld the impeller together. The second test showed that the suction was improved compare to the original impeller of the leaf blower but not very impressive. After trying to clean the Aluminum chips on my CNC machine, I think that the suction is actually not as strong as the original shop vac.
In the end, the leaf blower was very loud and not efficient for vacuum either. I will try to design and build a small size dust collector soon. - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
I like that you go for it and modify things and experiment. You are an artist.
Our intuition sometimes may not meet what we expected... but your diagnostic and design skills fixed it. Interesting. Good methodology.
A little disappointed, but I learned what's is need to build a dust collector/vacuum. I probably will use my CNC plasma cutter to make it. Should be a lot quicker compare to milling.
100% Learning and furthering understand is valuable. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Great video. I’m planning to use a dust collector so I’ll attach a hose and test it before tearing it down and building the finished idea. Thanks, saved me some time.
You are amazing. Very honest presentation. I was also thinking of using a leaf blower in place of shop vac motor head unit. After watching this video, I dropped my idea. Thank you. Keep the great work. Best of luck.
Great job, thank you for sharing.
Awesome! Thanks for the video. I'm surprised by how small the impeller is in the shop vac.
Me too when I first saw it. But I think the speed probably is the key. The small motor inside the shop vac must turn at real high RPM. From what I saw on Google, those motors run at 20k to 30k rpm. The impeller that I made was to heavy to run at that speed.
You probably know that the top part of the original impeller is to cool the motor. Also, the wider the impeller (larger radius) the higher the vacuum it will be able to draw, flow rate is less important than vacuum (for a vacuum cleaner) so it is flatter in the original. There is of course much more to impeller design than just those things. Well done and it was fun to watch you not giving up and finding out more things as you go on.
Thanks for staying with me till the end, you are as patient as I'm,lol!!! I understand a lot more about the vacuum and dust collecting system now. I just made a new design for the impeller that work with bigger dust collector and can really improve the vacuuming for small hose (force the air into the intake port). I tested that impeller for this leaf blower, it worked really well. But the noise level is still too high so I will build a bigger system that will use bigger but slower motor (around 3000rpm). I will have a new video about it soon.
A great example of CAD, i.e. cardboard aided drawing.
u did awesome jobs testing n doing some mod look nice
there actually other leaf blower that have enough power n sucking faster
you just have find one that suck up leaf in bag there few them out there will do little better then one u have on it but at least one u make is still working
I found out that the intake size is very important for the vacuum. When the intake is around 4", it can move a lot of air, the moment I reduced the intake to 1", the suction became very weak.
Trick with silicon: Apply silicon then spray soapy water and work in to crack. You will look pro mate.
thank you for the tip, I wouldn't know that if you didn't tell me
12:35 that dragon bite must have hurt, thanks god you killed it... with your dremel tool :)
nothing wrong with your trial, one thing is worthy: you learned something
Yes, sometime we need to pay a little price for the lesson.
IMHO, instead going small and fast - go big and slower on your air moving.
Yes, that is what I am thinking about to build my own dust collector.
Minh, you could to look into passive shoe solutions, with your spindle size, you might not need another motor to run .. Check thingiverse for "Passive Dust Shoe for CNC"
It's a nice concept but I also worry about vibration and cutting torque. It's probably OK when cutting wood or plastic but I will have to take it off if I want to cut aluminum because the impeller might created more vibrations and play.
that thing is not a low flow / high pressure device - the hose is too small for it, the leaf blower does work on its own (without modification) doesn't it ?
the vac would have 60 cfm the blower ~300cfm - this is a big mismatch
Just buy a vacuum already