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After Greg posted last week about his new Jet air filtration unit, I decided to finally break down and get one too.
I bought it from Amazon, and had read in their reviews a number of owners had trouble with things being bent during shipping. Well, add another one to the list. When I first plugged it it, the squirrel cage made about a half a revolution, then stopped. I removed the filters and tried spinning it by hand, It turned, but is was scraping as it went around. Since I'd read of a number of people fixing similar problems themselves, I decided to tear it apart and try doing the same. I really didn't want to deal with shipping it back to Amazon.
First step was to remove the squirrel cage and the motor. In their brilliant design, Jet made things so all the electrical connections from the motor attach to the electronic control panel with multi-pin plugs. Except one. The ground wire was connected with a hard-to-reach spade connection held in place with a nut. To heck with that. Snip.
After getting the squirrel cage/motor assembly out of the case, it saw what the problem was. One of the four motor mounts was bent, to the cage was tilted about 1 inch out of plumb with the other three, causing the cage to tilt, and thus rub the side of the blower housing. Without too much trouble, I removed the motor and mount from the cage, and with a few whacks of the dead blow hammer, the mount was bent back to where it was supposed to be. Another 5 minutes or so later, I had it all put back together, plugged it in, and it ran like a top. Nice and smooth. BTW, I added a length of wire and a couple wire nuts to handle the snipped ground wire.
That little glitch out of the way, it was time to hang it. By the way, this thing is bigger than I'd expected. Not terribly heavy, but big. It dwarfs my garage door opener. I ended up drilling through the roof trusses and running long eye bolts through the drywall ceiling and the trusses, with a nut and washer holding them in place. Fortunately, the previous owner left several access holes in the ceiling of the garage, so I was able to position it between two of these holes, allowing me to reach the bolts and nuts holding things in place. After getting the bolts in place, it took a bit of wrestling to get the filter up into position, but I did it in incremental steps, and eventually got it where I wanted it.
Here's the end result:
Here's a shot showing how I went through the roof trusses:
I positioned it so the intake is above and behind the lathe, where the majority of dust originates in my shop:
Although far from a scientific test, the preliminary results from my Dylos Air Quality Monitor look very promising. When I got done hanging the filtration unit, I turned on the Dylos meter and got a reading of about 20,000/1,500, where the 20,000 represents the number of 0.5 micron particles counted in 10 seconds of sampling, and the 1,500 is the number of 5 micron particles detected in the same period of time. These are very high numbers, according to Dylos. (The 20,000 was uncharacteristically high, since I was smoking a cigarette at the time, and that will easily double the 0.5 micron count.) The filter has now been running for about an hour on medium speed, and I just went and checked the numbers...they are at about 900/2. That's a very significant drop. I don't recall ever seeing the 0.5 micron number below about 8,000 or 9,000 before. When I get a chance, I intend to do some more testing under real woodworking conditions (and without the smoke skewing the results). I think it's going to definitely help reduce the amount of dust on all the flat surfaces in the shop.
I'm still not happy about having to completely dismantle a new piece of equipment and beat it with a hammer to make it work. I think I'll see if Amazon is willing to compensate me for my troubles.
I bought it from Amazon, and had read in their reviews a number of owners had trouble with things being bent during shipping. Well, add another one to the list. When I first plugged it it, the squirrel cage made about a half a revolution, then stopped. I removed the filters and tried spinning it by hand, It turned, but is was scraping as it went around. Since I'd read of a number of people fixing similar problems themselves, I decided to tear it apart and try doing the same. I really didn't want to deal with shipping it back to Amazon.
First step was to remove the squirrel cage and the motor. In their brilliant design, Jet made things so all the electrical connections from the motor attach to the electronic control panel with multi-pin plugs. Except one. The ground wire was connected with a hard-to-reach spade connection held in place with a nut. To heck with that. Snip.
After getting the squirrel cage/motor assembly out of the case, it saw what the problem was. One of the four motor mounts was bent, to the cage was tilted about 1 inch out of plumb with the other three, causing the cage to tilt, and thus rub the side of the blower housing. Without too much trouble, I removed the motor and mount from the cage, and with a few whacks of the dead blow hammer, the mount was bent back to where it was supposed to be. Another 5 minutes or so later, I had it all put back together, plugged it in, and it ran like a top. Nice and smooth. BTW, I added a length of wire and a couple wire nuts to handle the snipped ground wire.
That little glitch out of the way, it was time to hang it. By the way, this thing is bigger than I'd expected. Not terribly heavy, but big. It dwarfs my garage door opener. I ended up drilling through the roof trusses and running long eye bolts through the drywall ceiling and the trusses, with a nut and washer holding them in place. Fortunately, the previous owner left several access holes in the ceiling of the garage, so I was able to position it between two of these holes, allowing me to reach the bolts and nuts holding things in place. After getting the bolts in place, it took a bit of wrestling to get the filter up into position, but I did it in incremental steps, and eventually got it where I wanted it.
Here's the end result:
Here's a shot showing how I went through the roof trusses:
I positioned it so the intake is above and behind the lathe, where the majority of dust originates in my shop:
Although far from a scientific test, the preliminary results from my Dylos Air Quality Monitor look very promising. When I got done hanging the filtration unit, I turned on the Dylos meter and got a reading of about 20,000/1,500, where the 20,000 represents the number of 0.5 micron particles counted in 10 seconds of sampling, and the 1,500 is the number of 5 micron particles detected in the same period of time. These are very high numbers, according to Dylos. (The 20,000 was uncharacteristically high, since I was smoking a cigarette at the time, and that will easily double the 0.5 micron count.) The filter has now been running for about an hour on medium speed, and I just went and checked the numbers...they are at about 900/2. That's a very significant drop. I don't recall ever seeing the 0.5 micron number below about 8,000 or 9,000 before. When I get a chance, I intend to do some more testing under real woodworking conditions (and without the smoke skewing the results). I think it's going to definitely help reduce the amount of dust on all the flat surfaces in the shop.
I'm still not happy about having to completely dismantle a new piece of equipment and beat it with a hammer to make it work. I think I'll see if Amazon is willing to compensate me for my troubles.