Sawdust blower on a bandmill

[pineywoods]

I'm in dire need of some kind of sawdust blower for my LT40 woodmizer. It seems like I spend as much time shoveling sawdust as I do sawing. I mostly saw dead pine so wet sawdust is not much of an issue. The only setup I have seen is a 2hp electric blower hooked to about 30 ft of flexible hose thats suspended from the ceiling. What I would really like is a blower thats powered from the mill engine, in other words capable of portable operation. Where to mount it??? how to get power to it??? what size blower ??? I'm looking for ideas and even attempts that didn't work so well....

[getoverit]

You might try a billy goat blower like this





While it has it's own engine to run the blower, it works well and will even pick up wet sawdust if you need it to. I bought mine used on ebay for around $300 + shipping. I'm sure that one of the harbor freight blowers could be made to run off of a gas engine and would do the same thing. Unless you have a really big engine on the mill that has power to spare, I personally wouldnt run it off of the same engine as the blade because it draws a LOT of HP to run it.

[mike_van]

Here's what I had to do on mine to solve the shovel problem -
I run a 10 hp electric, 3 phase, the blower runs off the same motor. Push the start button, saw & blower come to life - The blower is about a 12" radial fan from Grainger, 6" pipe in & 5" flex pipe out. The 5" connects to a 20' length of sch. 20 pvc, this slides in & out of a 6" sch. 40. Sometimes in the winter, I get frozen sawdust in the flex pipe, it comes apart easily to bang it out. The blower is turning approx 3000 rpm, a 2 sheave pulley on the mill motor turns it. It was meant to be direct coupled to an electric motor, I added a shaft on 2 pillow blocks instead. If you email me, i'll send a larger pic. if you want, this was the biggest I could load.

[Bibbyman]

Here is a link to the post I made about our TimberKing blower we hooked up to our Wood-Mizer mill.

Blowing sawdust - TK blower



Lots more pictures on the post.  It's still working fine.

[pineywoods]

Thanks guys for the input

Bibbyman: Your setup is almost identical to a neighbor up the road. He came up with a different solution for the twist in the flex hose. He found a supplier for a ball joint splicer for 6" hose that has a 6" in and out, works great. Only problem is wet sawdust freezes in the hose and plugs it up, even when the outside temp is well above freezing. I kinda limited on blower options due to the lack of sufficient electrical power. no 220 so about 1hp is close to max if I use electric motor. 

mike_van: I tried the pipe-within-a-pipe on a friend's mill, couldn't get it to work. I was using 3" pipe inside of 4" just not big enough. Looks like 5 inside of 6 works fine. I like the concept because it does away with most of the flex hose and gets the pipe up out of the way. Your pic is fine, didn't take much looking to figure out how you did it. Is the inlet line to the blower metal or pvc? Be nice if the inlet was on the other side of the blower, fewer curves. Finding a mounting spot onthe woodmizer is going to be a real problem. The most logical place is right where the fuel tank is. Maybe I can relocate that. I was concerned about enough power, if yours works ok with 12 hp then I should be ok, current powerplant is a very tired 18hp briggs but that is about to get swapped out for 27 hp kawasaki. 

getoverit: Now who else but a bunch of do-it-yoursef sawmillers would think of using a billy-goat vacuum to suck sawdust out of a mill.... Maybe I can find a billy-goat with a blown motor, the blower looks like just about what I would need...

I may be forced to build my own blower, I built a smaller one to pull shavings out of my planner. It's just about impossible to keep balanced, therefore it eats up bearings, Hmm wonder if I could sneak into a tire shop and use their wheel balancer???

[mike_van]

This shows the inlet pipe, it's a piece of 6" stovepipe with a few ft. of flex to make the corner.
It works pretty good, I sure don't miss cleaning all that sawdust up, or wearing a mask at times. 

[pineywoods]

After several months of lurkin, cogitation, calculating, and just putting it off, here's my solution to the sawdust problem on a bandmill..Unless you can mount the blower on the sawhead, there's just no getting around using flex hose, so the problem is designing a system where the hose is in the way as little as possible.  so far this setup works OK.
The hose is suspended from the ceiling by a pulley running on a clothesline that runs the length of the shed.


The blower is a 2 hp unit from a harbor freight dust collector, trashed the cyclone and bags.


Pickup on the mill is homemade popriveted from sheetmetal, held in place with a bungee cord


The odd-shape contraption on top of the pickup is a slip joint. It's homemade, bent up out of sheet metal and brazed togather. It allows the hose to rotate as the mill moves back and forth.  Hooking a hose to a moving bandmill without a slipjoint of some kind just doesn't work, the hose will kink and collapse.



Sure is nice to not have to shovel sawdust at the end of the day...

[Dave Shepard]

It's not a billy goat, but it is designed to load trucks, hence the "TL33" model name. You use what you've got. ;)



Here is a close up of another swivel for anybody trying to hook up a vac.

[red]

Most people blow sawdust

[YellowHammer]

What I would really like is a blower thats powered from the mill engine, in other words capable of portable operation.  I'm looking for ideas and even attempts that didn't work so well....

I use a Timberkimg blower in a conventional setup.  However, if I was going to have a mill mounted, engine powered system, I would look real hard at putting a vane set onto the drive side bandwheeel and turning it into an actual blower using the existing band wheel cover or a modified one. Blow dust out of the chute.