madebymikal.com

I’ve been doing a lot more wood work recently, and I decided I wanted to write that up somewhere. Instead of posting it here, I also wanted to play with wordpress as an alternative hosting solution. The wood working is therefore being blogged on a new site, madebymikal.com. So far I’ve made a Thien Baffle cyclonic separator to stop my dust extractor filling with planer shavings, as well as documenting the process of making home made vanilla essence with turned bottle stoppers for Christmas. Oh, and I found a source of cheap high quality bar clamps in Australia.

Not too bad for the week before Christmas I don’t think.

Building a Thien Baffle

For a while now I’ve been meaning to play with making a Thien Baffle for my garage workshop. The motivation is that whilst I have a quite nice 3HP dust extractor (for those in the market for such a thing — don’t spend $1,400 with some retailers — I am super happy with my $500 unit from Leda Machinery), I want to keep the number of times I change the bags to a bare minimum. I see the dust extractor as a way of controlling potentially dangerous very fine dust, whereas some of the machines in my workshop create a lot of very large shavings — the thicknesser seems like the most obvious culprit here. It would be cool to divert these larger shavings into a bin where I can just use them as garden mulch, and then save the dust extractor bags for the fine and more dangerous dust.

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