Experimental Coal Vac

I would bet money you will get it to work somehow as you arent giving up easily. I enjoy a little fabrication myself. Keep at it.

I am in the final stage of putting together a coal vacuum system to unload my trailer using a 4" pipe and a lawn leaf cart blower to provide the vacuum. It will also use a backpack blower to push the coal. Hope to test it this weekend. I'll post some pics soon. Does the name Rube Goldberg sound familiar?

Sorry, but I have not had a lot of time to work on the Coal Vac this week. Though I have been reading members suggestions on this thread. Thank you all for contributing, these are some realy good ideas and I am thinking them all through.

CoalKirk, I would like to stop by and see your "Rub Goldburg" if you don't mind, I'll PM you.

Tonight I did get 2 things done. I made the flap valve to dump into the hopper. It's made out of a cheap @$$ hing, a piece of allthread, 2 nuts, a pipe hanger for a couterweight and a 2" PVC cap attached to the 4" to 2" reducer above the hopper.
To get some more power I taped in anouther shop vac. So now I have one 4HP and one 2.5HP vac. It's ironic that I started this project because I didn't want to use a shop vac and a 5gal bucket!
And this actualy worked! I filled four 5 gallon buckets and dumped them in the hopper. It still needs a LOT of refinement. It is working like the shop vac/5 gallon bucket systems in that the dump valve doesn't open until I shut off the shop vacs. I am also getting a little coal up through the 4" piping into the shop vacs. The counterweighted dump valve works great though. One load in this setup is about half a 5 gallon bucket.
This is revision V4.

-Don

Good for you. I like the automatic dump. Works well enough to keep you going to V5

Looks good.
To prevent coal from traveling to the shop vac's insert a piece of 1/4" hardware cloth into the port that the vacuum hose attaches to. You are probably pulling the coal into the vac's when you hit the end of the fill cycle.
Dan.

Revision V5.

Some succes today!

I have been tring to incorperate some of the ideas people have suggested in this thread. Today I got nice wide radius 45* and 90* PVC pieces. I ended up just using the 90*. I also got two 3 inch floor drains, I put them inside a 3" coupler at just happens to fit inside a 4" flared end. This located at the top, joined to the horizontal "T" facing down. The idea is to help deflect any coal back downward.
With the big wide radius bend and a shallower angle the coal flows easier.
I put an 8" extension on the bottom to reach down to the little hopper. The Yellow Flame hopper will be at the 4" to 2" reducer hight.
Look at that coal fall'in out of there!
I wasn't getting a good seal on the end of the cut pipe because the cut wasn't that clean and it's not quite the same size as the 2" cap i'm using as a flap valve. So I put a 2" coupler on it, now it seals nicely.
I cleaned the shop vac's today. I was suprized to see NO COAL got down in the shop vac's! only coal dust. I took the filters outside and blew them out with compressed air and reinstalled them.

This was the first time I have filled my hopper without touching a shovel OR a bucket!!!

It's not perfect yet, it still needs a bit more power, but, at least I CAN use it now.

-Don

Nice work there Don! After you perfect it for moving rice, perhaps you can begin designing one that will similarly move pea.

I don't know how to get this video from my phone and onto this forum but I'm sucking up coal through a 4" hose and loading a 55 gallon drum in about 3-4 minutes using the leaf vac blower.

Way to go Don! Now you get to have some fun refining it!

I really like your flapper and if you don't mind I will probably plagiarize a form of that for the chute from my barrel.

Can I request a pic on how you taped in the other shop vac too, please!

Congratulations, well done.

titleist1 wrote:Way to go Don! Now you get to have some fun refining it!

I really like your flapper and if you don't mind I will probably plagiarize a form of that for the chute from my barrel.

Can I request a pic on how you taped in the other shop vac too, please!

I don't have a real good photo of the joint but, the hose from each shop vac is just pushed into the black 4" pipe. Then I taped the joint up with Gorilla tape.
I could have used a PVC "T" and reducers, but, I had tape!

So far, out of this whloe adventure, the flap valve is the best working thing I have come up with. Yes, any one of you may use it, as long as you post some photos so others can see it work.

-Don

This system is on my LOOOOOOOONG list of projects I need to get to.

First, the crumbling chimney from the roof up ... and then my sieve of a porch roof ... and several automotive repairs in between all that. I may have something to offer the forum in about 5 years or so.

Smitty, in the mean time just watch for somebody getting rid of a shop vac or two and any 2" PVC pipe, then hold on to them until the time comes to pipe it up!

Smitty,

Good, that means I may have this thing finished before you start building one.

The way this currently works, since I don't have a big coal reservoir just a 4" pipe, I turn the vac ON for about a minute until the pipe fills up. Then I shut the vacs OFF, the flap valve opens and coal dumps into the hopper. I have to repeat this cycle 5 or 6 times to get the 90 pound hopper full. It's easier and cleaner than filling buckets and dumping them in the hopper, but it takes a bit of time.

The fact that it works now is part of the problem. I can work on other, more important projects. I have A few other ideas that if they work, will greatly improve and simplify the coal vac. I hope to get to them this month.

-Don

StokerDon wrote:The way this currently works, since I don't have a big coal reservoir just a 4" pipe, I turn the vac ON for about a minute until the pipe fills up. Then I shut the vacs OFF, the flap valve opens and coal dumps into the hopper. I have to repeat this cycle 5 or 6 times to get the 90 pound hopper full. It's easier and cleaner than filling buckets and dumping them in the hopper, but it takes a bit of time.
Don

Don, if you double the nominal diameter of the pipe, the cubic capacity of the resulting pipe effectively quadruples.
So you have 4" pipe now and you install a section of 8", the same length as the 4", the resulting hopper will hold four times the amount that the old hopper would. To increase that hopper to hold ninety pound you would have to multiply that hoppers length by 1-1/2 times.
But if that makes the hopper too long you can multiply the nominal diameter by 1-1/2 times, which would result in the diameter of the hopper being 12" pipe.
Now when you start getting into the larger sizes of PVC pipe the cost of fittings skyrocket to the point you would be better served by using steel instead of PVC.
If you can find a couple old well tanks with blown bladders, you could cut them open, remove the bladder and than weld them together to form your hopper. Since most well tanks are not 12"ID you would have to figure the volume you would need to hold 90# of coal at one time.
To figure the length of the hopper, you first would need to find out the cubic inches or cubic feet that 90# of coal displaces.
Than you would need to run this formula.
Volume - V
Tank ID - D
Total length - TL
Cubic inches per foot. - Cu/in/Ft

V = D X D X .7854 = Cubic inches per Inch of tank length.
Example.
V = 14 X 14 X .7854 = 153.9384
Tank has 14" ID
It holds approximately 154 cubic inches per inch of length.

To get cubic inches per foot
Multiply that by 12 to get Cu/ins/Ft.
154 X 12 = 1848
Divide that by 1728 to get cubic feet.
1848 / 1728 = 1.069444 cubic feet.
So if coal weighs 40#* per cubic foot you would need a hopper that is 2.25' for it to hold 90#.
Hope this helps.
Dan.
* this number is a guess and only a guess.