The Home Machinist!

If you keep vacuuming up steel chips it wont be long before you will not be able to lift your 10 Gal shop vac to dump it.

I think there is a drain in the bottom. If you heat the vacuum up to about 2500 degrees it should pour out.

Does it compress them enough to make a billet?

There are solutions, but in the end, the garbage man still hates you.

I pile it up in big buckets, and take it to the scrapyard once every few years with other steel scrap.
Sometimes they even pay me a couple of bucks.

I tried vacuuming, but the curly waste caught the ridges in the hose and a blockage formed within a minute that was fairly aggravating to clean out.
How many of you use a vacuum cleaner for this?

I use the shop vac for most cleanup. Once in a while the long stringy stuff bridges across the end of the hose, but the smaller stuff goes right through. If the hose gets a plug, I finds squeezing the hose by hand compacts the ball so it will go the rest of the way through.

As previously noted, the big problem is dumping a heavy tank after you have neglected it for too long.

I use the vacuum a lot. The curly swarf does clog easily so I try to collect those by hand or by sweep but for the small stuff that come from milling is really handy.
If it clogs
First try squeezing the hose
Then send a heavy bar and shake against gravity
Still clogged? Use the big gun

I use a vacuum but it isn't a shop vac. It's the vacuum part of a carpet cleaner, intended for sucking up water from a carpet. The hose is nearly twice the diameter of a shop vac hose (thus less pressure drop) and there is no filter. The flow enters tangentially so that the tank acts as a vortex seperator. There's just a screen over the blower inlet in the center. It is not suitable for fine sawdust without an exhaust hose out the door but it works *very* well for swarf and works as well as a shop vac for other stuff.

Have to be careful not to suck up parts and tools, though.

Have to be careful not to suck up parts and tools, though.

It happen so often

tornitore45 wrote: ↑Thu Aug 13, 2020 10:32 am

Have to be careful not to suck up parts and tools, though.

It happen so often

Not hard to pick up a chuck key when vacuuming chips off the drill press table.

I used to spend more time looking for the DP chuck key than drilling, until I tied it. Now it dangle in easy reach.
Can't do that with T-nuts, though.