Fein Shop Vac Cyclone Dust Extractor

thingiverse

I do a lot of woodworking and recently bought a Fein shop vac to replace a 20-year-old Craftsman that was still working but deafening at about 98 dB. The new Fein is as loud as our household vacuum, closer to 70 dB. It has more suction than the Craftsman, but can't hold as much waste and uses $7 bags. After my last project, I decided to get a cyclone separator for it to save money on bags. I looked at several options and came across Festool's separator for their shop vac, which is integrated with their vac and fits neatly on top of it. That was the way to go. 3/21/20 Added a video with more details on how it is assembled and works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYI9K-U88Ws There are two types of 'cyclones' used for separators: Cone and Spool. Most commercial offerings use Cone designs, so I started there. The Cone design would have probably worked fine as a separator, but I had several issues with it: * It was tall! And the return hose back to the vac coming out the top made it even taller. * The bottom of the cone limited the tray space available on top for tools. * It raised the point where the hose would attach very high, making it more likely to tip over the vac 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 is a lot more compact and addresses 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 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 even if you don't make the cyclone.