[008] Cyclone mod for Milwaukee backpack vacuum 

Everyone needs a backpack vac. Riding the bus and dirt on the seat? Backpack vac. Walking down the street and litter on the ground? Backpack vac. Plus you can pretend to be a ghostbuster!

@@toolscientist plus it's Milwaukee! I'm always looking for reasons to buy stuff I don't need in Red! Lmao

I'd have to test other vacs to compare. They might all lose flow rate this fast. The simplest thing they could have done is just use a big cylindrical filter that'll take longer to clog and will be easier to clean. I do want to try a multi-cyclone, though. 440g is weak-sauce. I want to be able to dump >2kg into this vac and have it still partying

I think Milwaukee intended for the inner to be a cyclone, but ditched it late in the design. I suspect they hit problems with having too much resistance, or having an inlet that's prone to clogging. I somewhat solved those problems by going multi-inlet, which isn't a conventional cyclone design. There's also cost. I can make it as complex as I like because I don't need to mass produce it. It is strange that no construction grade vacuum has tried proper cyclonic separation (the Makita stick vacs are the closest). Cyclone's are obviously well established in residential vacs, but construction vacs just use pulsed air to knock dust out of the filter. It's a challenging design to get that balance between filtration and flow loss. Adding a cyclone will always reduce the flow, but it helps in the long run

Winning!

I actually find "cubic ferrets per minute" to be a fairly intuitive unit 😄

Tiger King Blood? Is that a cross between Tiger King and Charlie Sheen? I'm not sure if the world is ready for that crossover.

Only "finance bro", though. I might try again in a few months to get to "Tiger Blood" status. I want to be able to dump >2kg in this thing and have it still wanting to party.

Thanks! Sometimes the vid feels like the hardest part. I got to have some fun with this one, though. I think hypnotic-eyed James Dyson was my favourite part 😄

I had thought of modding it to accept Dewalt filters as they're larger, cheaper, and easier to clean, but I hadn't thought to try a bag mod. It would be tricky as the cannister only opens at the bottom, so you'd have to slide your hand up the side to unlatch and remove it. Hard to compete with the flow rate of a bag, but ultimately it's still just a filter that will reduce the flow as you add dust, just not as fast as a raw filters. A well designed cyclone will give you less flow at the start, but should stay very flat as you add dust. I've got an old dyson, and its filter still looks pristine. If I do the multi-cyclone mod, then an interesting follow-up would be to get an old shop vac and do a bag vs multi-cyclone experiment. If the cyclone flow rate doesn't overtake the bag until the bag is nearly full, then that's a win for the bag.

"In America, first you collect the dust, then you get the power, then you get the women"

If I do the mylti-cyclone mod, then there's "Say hello to my little cyclones!"

@@toolscientist the only thing in this world that gives cyclones is...balls.

I think I should change it to Iguana Nose so that it abbreviates to "in."

Too tall as it is. If I do more work on this, I'll compare all the designs (Stairmand, Lapple, Bill Pentz, Dust Deputy, Dyson, and a few others that I've found in research papers). Whichever one gives me the best filtration for a given pressure loss will be what I use.

Unfortunately not. The dust at the bottom of the cannister has little effect on the flow. What matters is how much dust gets in the filter. My mods slow down how quickly the dust gets into the filter, but they still let some through. So the flow will continue to decrease until you clean the filter.

I'm winning!

That's the plan. I just upgraded from a 100x100x100mm printer to a 240x240x240mm printer last week, which will allow me to print that whole inner piece as one part. I'll do a multi-cyclone mod and a cylinder filter mod and see how they compare

I truely mean this, thank you so much for your work. If you make it, I'll buy it, that is if you make it available for sale. I don't have a 3D printer, so it'd be great if you sold the part pre-made.

Did the clear cannister break?

Yeah, I've been disappointed with most. They all clog up too quickly. Need a good cyclone or pulsed air filter cleaning. None of them are any good for home use as they lack a powered head. I think there's a Ryobi with a powered head.

​@@toolscientist I'm hoping PF will do a comparison on small handhelds. Did you see Torque Test Channel recent video on (edit: universal battery and) adapters? Thought of you str8 away.

@Hagar76a didn't he do handhelds last week? They were all residential vacs, though. Even amongst tool brands there's so many variations. PF tends to end up with outdated models for some of the brands, so it's often a bit apples to oranges. I saw the CEENR vid of TTCs. I made a comment there. Looks like it's a pack with stand-alone protection. From TTCs load tests, it was losing 1V compared to the Bosch and Dewalt, which works out to about 27mOhm extra resistance. They must be using really bad mosfets to get that as you can get 10mOhm from $0.60 mosfets. There must be some other source of resistance, maybe thin traces on the PCB. They look to be using a pair of 5mOhm shunts (so 2.5mOhm total) which is 10x more than Makita uses.

@@toolscientist yeah he did upright/combo domestic. I just need a small handheld for small cleanups. That's disappointing. A true universal battery system can only help to bring the costs down for consumers, if its done right. It is great that they are using 40T exclusively. Keeps it simple.

Were you trying to watch it embedded on another site? I'll check the settings

Ok, I'd turned off embedding for some reason. Should be working now.

@@toolscientist Awesome, it's working now. I love your scientific approach and tinkering with stuff 😊💖 Also: Nice turd you got there 😁

​@@michaelseitz8938 where were you watching this video?

@@riba2233 On RU-vid. I guess an extension confused RU-vid ...

Not massive. That whole inner cone is 180mm diameter and I think 230mm deep. My printer is 100x100x100mm though. The inlet ring had to be done in 4 parts. Any thoughts on decent printers? I could try getting someone else to print it, but tolerances need to be fairly good, so I'll have to do a few iterations.

Yeah, it was a bit of a disappointment. They would have been better off just using a big cylindrical filter with a pre-filter bag. First time I used it, it only lasted a few hours of light drilling before needing the filter cleaned. Then I took it apart and realised it wasn't really cyclonic at all. That was 2020, so I finally got around to pimping it 4 years later.

@@toolscientist ok that doesn't sound bad at all. My rec would be qidi Q1 pro, it has sturdy chassis, heated chamber and klipper firmware with a good extruder system and is almost a bargain for what it offers. And you will want a heated chamber as someone like you would print abs and PC mainly :)

@@toolscientist you might wanna get a Bambu printer? for the P1 series the print size is 256mm on all 3 axis, print time's fast too so it saves you some time between iterations bloody amazing job with that design btw!

@wingka I've been tempted by the Bambu's as I'd like something that just works. The Qidi Q1 Pro is half the price for the same build volume, though. Looks like I've got to read a whole lot of reviews. Been 10 years since I bought a 3D printer, so I imagine a lot has changed.

That's not very pimp, though. "Yo dawg, I heard you don't like clogged filters...so I removed your filter"

👍

Been wanting to do this since I first bought this vac (late 2019). Finally got the time to do it. Actual project started in Feb this year.

Are you saying that this video should be 14min instead of 7min long, or that I should have spent 6 rather than 3 months on this project?