Fein Shop Vac Cyclone Dust Extractor

thingiverse

I do a lot of wood working and I recently bought a Fein shop vac to replace a Craftsman that I had had for 20 years. The Craftsman was still working, but it was deafening, at about 98 dB. The Fein is about as about as loud as the vacuum that we use in the house, closer to 70 dB. The Fein has more suction that the Craftsman, but it can’t hold as much waste, and it uses $7 bags. After my last woodworking project, I decided that I should get a cyclone separator for it, to save money on the bags. I looked at several options, and I came across the separator that Festool offers for their shop vac. It is integrated with their vac, fitting neatly on top of it. I decided that, that was the way to go. 3/21/20 Added a video with more details on how it is assembled and how it works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYI9K-U88Ws There are basically two types of ‘cyclones’ used for separators: Cone and Spool. Most commercial offerings are Cone designs, so I started there. The Cone based design would have probably worked fine as a separator, but I had a number of issues with it: • It was tall! And the return hose back to the vac, coming out the top, would make it even taller. • The bottom of the cone limited the tray space available on the top for tools. • It raised the point where the hose would attach very high, making it more likely to tip over the vac over if I pulled on the hose very hard. • And it was sort of ugly. I settled on the Spool based design, which isn’t quite as efficient a separator, but it’s a lot more compact and addressed all of the issues above. The important part of designing an add-on cyclone dust separator is holding a good vacuum. You want to eliminate, or at least minimize any vacuum leaks. I printed seals for the hoses using TPU filament. For the seals that were too big to print as a single part, I used o-ring cord, which can be cut to length and the ends superglued together to form an o-ring seal. This design uses big parts (310x270mm), which take a lot of time and filament to print. My overall print was about 250 hours. I quartered the main parts of the body to fit on my print bed, and each quarter of the Top took about 40 hours to print. It also took most of 3 2kg spools of filament to print, but that did include some reprints. There is a short video of it swirling some dust here https://youtu.be/r2lwxvMISYQ. I also included some adapters that I designed, which allow me to use my old 1.25 inch ID Craftsman attachments. If you have a Fein shop vac, you might want to print these, ever if you don't make the cyclone.