3D Printing for the Woodworking Shop

My next project was a little more ambitious. I decided to try printing a cyclone similar to a Dust Deputy. I found a few different designs on Thingiverse including one that you could customize directly on the website but wasn't happy with the size or parameters of any of them. Instead, I spent a couple of weeks working on several different designs in Sketchup. Here is the first prototype printed at 1/10th scale.


To get a little more height and to make it easier to print without tons of support structures. I opted for a 2 part design. The bottom section is a cone with the mounting flange and the top section is a cylinder that mounts on top of the cone that provides the input and output hose connections. This is where I discovered that Sketchup can be a little frustrating for a novice such as myself when trying to develop 3D prints. Any little gap can cause the slicer to get confused and create surfaces that aren't there. This is especially true when you use curves. Because Sketchup draws curves as a bunch of line segments, intersections with those segments can create microscopic gaps that sometimes even sketchup gets confused about. Because of the complexity of drawing cones and cylinders for the hose connections I nearly gave up but finally worked through all the little problems , starting over at least twice. I am sure that some of the problems I had were due to my inexperience with Sketchup. This is where I discovered the solids inspector extension that helps quite a bit but sometimes the only solution was to delete part of the design and redraw it.

After printing, I discovered that my hose connections were a couple of millimeters too small for my shop vac hoses, even though I had printed several test rings prior to printing to make sure that they fit. I suspect that the filament I used may have warped or shrunk slightly as it cooled but who knows. Since each of the 2 sections took about 24 hours each to print and used about about a a quarter of a roll of filament, I decided to just design an adapter to enable the hose and PVC pipe to fit.

I printed this one in some PETG filament that I read was suppose to be easy to print and a little tougher than the PVA that is most common. It seems to be a pretty tough but it is a PITA to print. It leaves tons of little hairs and one of my first prints started to warp pretty badly so I aborted and started over after adjusting some of the printer's temperature settings. But ultimately it worked out okay.





The bungee cords are used to hold it on top of the shop vac and to prevent me from pulling it over when I drag the hose around the shop. One of these days, I will make a platform that sits on top of my shop vac to hold the bucket and cyclone.

I just emptied the HD bucket for the first time after a couple of weeks of use and checked the shop vac to see if anything is getting through, especially after running my Dewalt planer through it. The bucket was about half full but no chips made it through the cyclone into the shop vac. There was a light coating of really fine dust on the filter but not bad enough that I needed to clean the filter off yet.

If I were designing again, I would probably make the intake wall a little thicker. I made the walls about 4mm thick and it seems to be holding up so far but time will tell.

Tony, you are right that one of the strengths is in being able to make adapters and replacements for old tools that you cannot find anymore or things that no one else makes at all. But not counting the cost of the printer which will be recouped over time or my time to design and experienment, this actually was cost effective. The Cura slicer software calculates how much filament it will take when your run the slicer. I didn't write down the exact amount it computed but it was in the ballpark of 250 grams for each half (top and bottom) of the cyclone. A roll of filament is typically 1 KG and this roll costed about $20 on sale so not counting some of the small tests I did to check the diameter and fit between the upper and lower halves, I estimate that the filament cost me a little over $11 to print including the 2 adapters I had to make. An earlier design was going to be almost double that because of all of the support structures that would have been printed to deal with overhangs, etc. so paying attention to that during the design can save you filament costs, not to mention the extra time it takes to print,

Is it worth it rather than just buying a Dust deputy for about $50? Maybe not but this was as much about seeing what I could do and learning 3D printing as it was about making a usful tool for the shop. Frankly, my old $3 Theon baffle that this replaces worked just fine and probably as just as well, though I do think I get a little more suction. Another thing I noticed is that when I used to disconnect the pipe between the old separator and the vac, the pitch of the motor would change indicating a reduction in the airflow. Oddly enough, I don't detect a change when I do that with this one.

My experience on cost is like Nathan's. The filament cost is not too painful and compares well to what a similar commercial part would cost. Of course my experience level is also similar to Nathan's; I too am just getting started with this.

I've been making dust collection fittings and adapters for my upgrade to six inch hose. The fittings typically use about 250g of filament for a material cost of about $5 each. Print time is eight to ten hours each. Design time seems endless but I'm still learning Fusion 360 so lots of backtracking and Youtube viewing.

This 100mm to 6" DVW adapter and matching quick connect hose end could be made with a PVC coupling, a six to four HVAC reducer and some duct tape for about $15 but would not include the latch that keeps the hose from falling off when the DC is shut off.

Well, knock on wood, my Creality Ender-3 design implemented by Sainsmart seems to be pretty solid so far. It actually came partially assembled. The X-axis, its stepper and the extruder/gantry were fully assembled and simply had to be slid onto the vertical rails and adjusted to make it tight and level so assembly wasn't too bad. X & Y axes are controlled with a toothed belt and the Z-axis uses a drive screw. It came with a micro SD card and a USB reader to use with the PC, that came preloaded with an older version of the Cura software plus some test g-code for the first run. The electronics are basically a black box with a separate display panel with control nob and the cables are all clearly labeled for easy identification. Cable management is mostly non-existent but after a little fiddling I've got them under control. There are plenty of cable management designs on thingiverse specifically for the Ender-3 if you want to make everything a little neater. The packaging it came in was pretty impressively padded as well. Every part was well padded by foam and would have taken a pretty major crush to bend or break anything. I think than mine was delivered directly from the local Amazon warehouse, using Amazon's delivery service so UPS and USPS didn't get a chance to try.

BTW, I also bought a couple of spools of Sainsmart filament from Amazon. They are a little pricey but compared to the Amazon Basics filament I bought, which is a tangled mess, it is a dream to use because it is neatly wound on the spool so you don't have to worry about tangles at all. That was pretty important on the cyclone which took about 24 hours for each of the 2 halves to print. Definitely worth a few extra bucks to avoid tangles from causing a long print to fail.

My only comments about 3d printing for the shop is to ditch Sketchup and go to something more robust. Sketchup can be a bit of a hassle when trying to make your parts "manifold" or watertight, and for 3d printing, not being manifold can result in non-printable parts. There is software to fix them but it's just another step you should go through. My preference is the AutoDesk Fusion 360 which is free for hobbyists making less than $100K/yr with it, and there are many YouTube videos to help you start using it. There are other free CAD tools also, like Blender, Freecad, TinkerCAD, OpenSCAD, and others.

There is a Facebook group for the Creality CR-10 series of printers and the Ender line is welcome since quite a lot of it has parts compatible with the CR-10 line. There is a REDDIT group just for the Ender 3.

Wayne

I almost forgot about this one. My wife bought a cheap Delta 10" bandsaw at an estate sale. I didn't like it so we decided to sell it but it was missing the table insert. I was going to just make one out of wood but it would have had to make it out of less than 1/8 wood or route a rabbet around the edge to which was going to be a PITA. I could not find a compatible one on all the usual web sources either and then it occurred to me to just print one. I found several for different saws on thingiverse. I tried to just modify one of those to fit but in the end it was easier to just design one from scratch in Sketchup. It took about 10 minutes to design and, if I remember correctly about 45 minutes to print. I printed with pretty low quality settings but was good enough to sell the saw (and make $100 profit).