Hasta La Ideas

In Part 1 of The Quest for an Affordable Dust-Collecting Cyclone, I got one of the facts backwards; luckily Stuart Deutsch (newly-minted PhD in Materials Science and Engineering, congrats Stu!) over at ToolGuyd wrote in to set the record straight. I’d incorrectly stated that “most of the dust (and particularly the fine particles) gets sucked away by the vortex,” but in fact it’s the reverse. As Deutsch points out,

Generally, cyclones are more efficient at separating out larger and heavier debris and particles. In terms of woodworking, they’re better at trapping chips, shavings, and coarse particles, than lighter and finer dust that often continues on to the dust collector or shop vacuum anyways. Still, separators do greatly cut down on dust collector/shop vacuum maintenance.

Deutsch has also written a more extensive explanation of how dust cyclones work, and in our correspondence, kindly pointed the way towards two other DIY dust cyclone options:

The first, which is pictured at the top of this entry, is the Mini Cyclone Bucket Dust Collector, an Instructable written by a guy named Steli. Parts will run you about US $25 and it’s “easy to build in a weekend.” Steli lives in Europe, and when American readers commented that they couldn’t find the common-in-Europe funnels in the size specified by Steli’s design, he came up with an interesting suggestion:

“Buy an emergency street/traffic cone, and cut it down to your diameter size and length.”

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When Morpholio Projects released their Trace app for iPad at the end of September, the architectural community was abuzz with the possibilities that a digital version of trace paper would afford the profession. The app allowed users to instantly draw on top of imported images or background templates, layering comments or ideas to generate immediate, intelligent sketches that are easy to circulate.

Developed by architects, Trace allows users to trace over images in order to offer feedback or convey information quickly and graphically. Additionally, the app easily connects to an online community through their Eye Time function allowing a global community of users to provide feedback on work shared in public arenas: Crit, Pinup and Community.

Today, Trace announced the release of Automotive Design and Jewelry Design templates for their growing base of users. Working with Brett Stoltz, Industrial Design Transportation Track student from the University of Cincinnati, on the automotive templates and Liz Ricketts, co-founder of design education organization (the)OR, for the jewelry design templates, Morpholio Projects hopes to enhance the interative process for product designers. In conversation with Core77, Ciara Seymour, Morpholio UX Director, tell us, “The inherently iterative process of design lies central to the ability to reimagine within known constraints. These templates begin to provide students with a variety of basic and advanced perspective views as a foundation from which to begin designing.”

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If you’ve ever seen a dust-collecting cyclone in person (I checked one out in Dino Makropoulos’ New Jersey shop), you’ll be surprised at how simple and jeez-I-could-build-wunna-these it looks.

Woodworker J. Phil Thien figured he could build a dust cyclone, and make an improvement to boot. Thien’s innovation was to add, at the top of the conical chamber, a baffle to reduce what’s called “scrubbing”; that’s when dust swirling around in the cyclone, rather than gathering on the bottom, burps back up into the top (and hence into the shop vac, the place you’re trying to keep it out of). By providing a circumferential slit in the baffle for the material to drop down into (the centrifugal force of the cyclone drives the dust towards the edges), but with the baffle blocking most of the bottom from the top, he figured he’d fix the scrubbing problem.

Two years and fifty prototypes after conceiving of it, Thien had produced a baffle that was up to snuff. With the shop vac on and his baffle attached to the cyclonic intermediary, he found he was getting very little dust making it into the vac; most of it wound up in the bottom of the cyclone. Despite his success, Thien has opted not to bring his design into production, and since its creation dozens of woodworkers have built Thien Cyclone Baffles based on his design.

Wanna see it in action? This guy below built one with plexiglas sides so we could see the vortex/dropdown action:

By the way, although Thien has opted not to commercialize his design, he has patented it. So don’t you Quirky Kickstarters go getting any ideas.

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Artist Chuck Close has described his work as “monumental in scale and brutal in detail.” The phrase is just as apt when referring to the painstaking process of cataloguing his oeuvre, according to Carina Evangelista, the editor of the Chuck Close Catalogue Raisonné. The just-launched publication puts a new spin on the form–a comprehensive, annotated listing of all the known works of an artist either in a particular medium or all media–as Chuck Close: Paintings, 1967-present also marks the official launch of Artifex Press, a New York-based startup dedicated to the production of digital catalogues raisonnés.

“Our catalogues are every bit the equal of the catalogues raisonnés you know in book form,” said Artifex Press editor-in-chief David Grosz at the launch event held recently at the New York Public Library. “We’re a publishing company, but we’re also a software company.” Grosz co-founded Artifex in 2009 with Pace Gallery’s Marc Glimcher. The Close catalogue debuted alongside Jim Dine: Sculpture, 1983-present, and will be followed by catalogues raisonnés of Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin. Projects are also in progress with contemporary artists including Tara Donovan, Thomas Nozkowski, James Siena, and Richard Tuttle.

With the help of a Macbook, Grosz and Evangelista clicked through a tour of the Close catalogue and its fuss-free functionality as the charismatic artist himself provided running commentary. “It’s a nauseating amount of images,” said Close, as they did a quick sort for self-portraits and his “Big Self Portrait” (1967-68, pictured above) filled the screen. “When I put this image in books I have to add a disclaimer telling kids not to smoke.” Later, it was on to archival photos. “Oh look, there’s Joseph Beuys looking at my painting,” Close said of a 1974 snapshot of the German artist sizing up a Close canvas. “I didn’t know he cared.”
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Sears Employee: “I’m pretty sure they don’t make that…and if they do, we don’t sell ’em.”

I previously wrote about gunsmithing/hollow-ground screwdriver bits here, and in the two years since, my ever-growing collection has served me well in my machine repair hobby. But a few months ago, as I diversified into larger industrial sewing machines, I began encountering huge screws I had no bits for. (If you have old woodworking machinery, factory machines or similar, you may have encountered the same thing when trying to repair or adjust them.) These screws had heads a half-inch or more in diameter, with slots in odd widths like 0.087″; the largest Brownells bit available is too small by half, in both dimensions.

Googling “Large hollow-ground screwdriver bits” yielded no results. Burning shoe leather didn’t pay off either–three local hardware store clerks, two people in the Craftsman section of the local Sears and even a local gunsmith all had no idea where I could find extra-large hollow-ground bits. But finally an old-school mechanic in an online forum turned me on to what I was looking for: They’re called “drag link sockets.”

A “drag link” is an outdated piece of steering linkage found on utility vehicles like trucks and jeeps. And it’s held on with a big-ass machine screw. “Drag link sockets” are therefore just huge hollow-ground bits with a female end that accepts the square drive of a socket wrench, to get the drag links off.

Once I had the appropriate term to Google, I found they’re still made and sold by a lot of different manufacturers. Including, of course…Sears Craftsman. Anyways I’ve titled this post so that the next poor bastard replicating my initial search will find the answer right away.

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