This system is now on the floor. It has a 10 foot flexible 1 1/4 hose, with snap fit adapters, that will fit all is the electric sanders on the shop. Adapters are on the top of the platform. The hose can swap out to the original 2 1/2 inch house. Those attachments are all on the cart. Hoses press fit onto the cyclone top.
The bucket is very easy to empty. The cyclone top pops right off. Pull the bucket and dump. With the separator, it’s easy to use to clean up the router, bandsaws, tablesaw, etc… Clean sanding is now really easy.
One thing I’d point out- we’ve used these before. A prob that kept coming up was if something blocks the hose, in a few seconds it will develop enough vacuum that the bucket will implode. Pretty easy to do, if it just picks up a piece of cardboard or the hose suckers itself against the floor. This does tend to break the bucket, and it happened repeatedly.
There’s an easy long-term solution- find a 5 gal pool chlorine tablet bucket. It’s pretty much the same bucket dimensionally, but they’re much thicker and stiffer, and, at least with the vac we’d used it with, the vacuum could not collapse it. People throw these buckets out all the time, just keep an eye out for them.
I did look into vacuum breakers, there is something off-the-shelf. The one I bought and experimented with didn’t open soon enough and far enough, though. It doesn’t take much vac to implode the Home Depot/Lowes buckets.
Thanks, Danny.
HD buckets are weak, as you say. Most cheap buckets are. I have a 90 mil bucket on order to replace the 70 mil HD bucket. It’s already distorting. I’ll swap it out on Saturday. I’ll also go smaller on the next system vac, and check with neighbor pool owners for the chlorine buckets. That’s a great tip.
