Trap for Your Shop Sink

glenn bradley

Member
Messages
11,515
Location
SoCal
I worry about glops of thicker material going down the drain. I have also had to take the trap out to save the errant small washer, toothpick or even Q-Tip that made it to the scupper to quick for my occupied hands. A discussion on another forum had some folks recommending these:

Hmmm, Commercial unit, $73.50 plus tax and shipping . . . . . Nahhhhh.

Trap-eze-commercial.jpg

$15 at Lowe's and an old spaghetti sauce jar. If Red Green could only see me now.

Trap-eze-shop-made.jpgTrap-eze-shop-made-2.jpg

Screws right into place and works great.
 
Last edited:
Great idea, Glenn. :thumb:Definitely filing that idea away for future reference. Did you cut the hole in the lid, or find one with a hole already in it? How is it sealed to the ABS fitting?

My dad used to own (and I used to work at) a materials testing lab, and they had a large sand trap in the drain system. (Several of the tests we ran involved "washing" a soil sample to remove all the clay and silt, leaving only the sand and rocks. Doing so involved flushing a lot of fines down the drains.) The sand trap was simply a pair of concrete-lined pits in the floor, about 4' square and about 3' feet deep. It was essentially two concrete boxes side by side sunken into the floor, with a common wall between them. The drain line entered the first box about 6" below below the rim and flowed out the second box at about the same height. The wall between the two boxes also had a hole the same size as the drain lines at about the same level. This allowed the solids to settle out of the drain flow and kept us from clogging the drain lines going to the city system. Every so often someone (usually me, since I was the high school kid doing grunt work) would have to muck out the sand trap to remove the material that had settled in it. It was not fun digging out 24" or so of saturated clay and silt from a concrete box sunken below the floor level.
 
Sounds kind of like a septic tank Vaughn!

On our property, the previous owners put a septic tank above ground to use as a water tank for feeding the irrigation system... It looks exactly like what you just described...

Dang thing leaks like a sieve. Really need to replace it...

Oh wait a sec... :threadjacked:

Sorry about the thread jack :rofl: :rofl:
 
Did you cut the hole in the lid, or find one with a hole already in it? How is it sealed to the ABS fitting?

I drilled a 1/2" hole and used snips to cut it out to rough size. I then used the spindle sander to clean the hole up to size. A rubber washer seals the outer and inner sides of the cap when the nut is tightened to the fitting's shoulder. I ran a bead of silicone around top and bottom prior to assembly too but don't know that this is necessary.

Note: I sanded the threaded collar that is under the lid down to make it a nut. This does not show in the pic because I had not yet made the modification.
 
Drain Trap - Update

I am pretty careful about what goes down my shop sink. No dangerous materials; there are better ways to deal with those. I do run the swarf down when stoning my scrapers but, this is very little (although heavy) waste. I cleaned the trap back in September before I started the current project so this is mostly washed off glue and other "dirty" waste from stoning a scraper, cleaning tools and hands. I just thought the amount of heavy waste captured was interesting

Drain-trap-2012.jpg

. . . maybe I need to get a life :D.
 
Last edited:
Glenn thanks i am gonna implement this in the house. It will give me peace at least when i stop my idiots from putting stuff down the drain they should not. What a great idea.
 
As I poured out the gunk in the bottom out I noticed it was mostly glue and soap gook. On the very bottom was quite a decent slug of metal "powder" so it is doing a better job than I thought of trapping the heavy stuff. It was darn cheap and easy to do and obviously keeps some shop spoil out of the water system ;-)
 
Great idea. I really dislike plumbing but I guess I'd rather be doing preventative maintenance than emergency repair.
 
Top