Big Old Vacuum Tank For Dying Wood.

Hukk · Post by **Hukk** » Tue Dec 25, 2007 8:36 pm

I finally got around to taking a few pictures of my vacuum/pressure tank tank that I am going to use to pull a vacuum to help dye woods all the way through. I can use a refrigerator compressor to pull a vacuum that should exceed 28 inches of mercury (measuremanent of vacuum - perfect being 30 inches and absolute being near 28 or 28.5 inches of mercury). In a nutshell, how well does it suck out the air and hold it.

The tank is welded 1/2 inch solid steel and using water based dyes, even dense wood should be completely dyed in a week. To move this thing around I need to build a dolly with handles - similar to a shopping cart like those that they have at Home Depot, but much smaller. I will also need to run methyl alcohol through it to keep rust away.

I need to do a few more things before it is entirely up and running such as gauges, a port for pressure, one for vacuum is already there. Also should put a drain at the bottom

. All the ports have O-ring seals. Well, it does hold both a high vacuum and about 200 LBS of pressure, I've tested that (100 is on it now). If it works well, I will move to a stainless steel tank and see about some polymers and acrylics for doing my own stabilization down the road since I do have a lot of experience working with monomers, polymers, and acrylics.

The open port is about 8 inces in diameter.

brucegodlesky · Post by **brucegodlesky** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 10:07 pm

That's slick, Hukk.

Hukk · Post by **Hukk** » Thu Dec 27, 2007 10:44 pm

brucegodlesky wrote:That's slick, Hukk.

Thank you! It allows me more control over the colors I use and I may experiment with wood stabilization. But since the whole thing is 1/2 inch thich solid steel walls, I need to get it on wheels as it is mighty heavy. Some where north of 100 lbs.

More heavy duty than I need, but FREE is the right price for the steel.

wildcat · Post by **wildcat** » Fri Dec 28, 2007 1:40 pm

That's sweet!

I've just been using a mason jar and break bleeder hand pump.

Hukk · Post by **Hukk** » Fri Dec 28, 2007 7:33 pm

wildcat wrote:That's sweet!

I've just been using a mason jar and break bleeder hand pump.

That works too! I can put an open mason jar in there, but if I put a sealed one in there; in theory it would implode and make a mess. I'm making an alteration now. So I can have a drain, a vacuum line with a valve and guage, and a pressure line valve and guage. This way I can mount it on a dolly with the refrigerator compressor and have either pressure or a vacuum by turning the valves.

I just need to see how well a refrigerator compressor works. With all the ports having o-ring seals, I sould be able to run the compressor for a few minutes-then shut it off.

wildcat · Post by **wildcat** » Fri Dec 28, 2007 7:41 pm

what i meant was i have the solution in the mason jar. i then put the material in the mason jar and seal the lid. the lid has a small hole for the hose of the hand pump.

an 8 inch opeing makes that a pretty big tank. you can do a months work of stabilizing with that.

How much are you charging for your stabilization services?

9ball · Post by **9ball** » Fri Dec 28, 2007 8:53 pm

Hukk,

I use a vacuum chamber (Bell Jar) in my work, but use a refrigeration vacuum pump.
Those compressors get mighty hot and the oil in them is 300w. If you spill any, it will be there for awhile and it has to wear off your skin. Plus they have a start/stop capacitor on the side that tells it when & what to do and you may have to by-pass that.

I understand what you are doing but not exactly how you are doing it. I would be careful if you are using flamable liquids.
Here is a photo of mine at work I posted awhile back goofing around. What you see is a billard ball (Number 9, of course) in a beaker of distilled water at about 30 pounds. I am at about 2000 feet above sea level and that is what it takes to pull a complete vaccum here.

It looks like the water is boiling, but what is happening is the vaccum is pulling all the "O" out of the "H". I can cut the pump off and it will hold vacuum as long as I need it.
If it cannot "Boil" water, then it is not pulling enough vacuum, no matter what the gauge may read.

Not sure how large a pressure chamber you need, but you can build one out of a pressure cooker for about 10 bucks. Or even one of those large canning cookers, they already have the pressure gauge.

9ball

Hukk · Post by **Hukk** » Fri Dec 28, 2007 10:37 pm

I used to rebuild the roughing pumps, foreline pumps, and an ocassional diffusion pump. A diffusion pump is basically a boiling pot of oil using liquid nitrogen to keep the oil vapors from escaping. The only things that usually went wrong with those was a water jacket got plugged or a heater element went bad. I was working in maintenance for Hewlett Packard and then Agilent Technologies in a cleanroom environment. I also worked on cryo pumps, turbo pumps and others, most were PLC controlled (ladder type).

Funny but true. Since I see a bell jar there (only dropped one, about $1100 at the time

) I know you are familiar with the importance of the bottom edge having no cracks and and must have a "perfect seal". Well all the companies that trued up the bottoms of the bell jars were in the silicon valley, 2 1/2 hours south of Santa Rosa. Well we had a Bell Jar that needed an inch cut off and trued up. So, we tried a local company that charged about $300.00. MAN did they ever screw it up. It came back to us and it looked like they too a 36 grit pneumatic grinder to it. That thing would not hold water, let alone never pull a vacuum.

What a mess.

I'm pretty familiar with some rather hazardous materials, even some that are not to bad.

Thanks for the heads up, I do have experience, otherwise I would not recommend anyone try it. I hope to get into monomers and acrylics but that is down the road. Have experience with those also and chemicals and gasses assoaciated with a semiconductor lab.

9ball · Post by **9ball** » Sat Dec 29, 2007 1:57 am

Okay.......but if I see two Suns settin' in the West, I'll be thinkin' of ya.

Hukk · Post by **Hukk** » Sat Dec 29, 2007 2:48 am

9ball wrote:Okay.......but if I see two Suns settin' in the West, I'll be thinkin' of ya.

I never blew myself up before, maybe yet is more appropriate.

I am very familiar with monomers, polymers, and acrylics in raw form. Some of them were not all that healthy to be around. I was a jack of all trades guy where I did failure analysis, maintenance including preventative maintenance as well as troubleshooting and repair, and a junior scientist in material sciences with a touch of metalurgy. Then they give me 277 computors to maintain, but only 1 hour per day to do this.

These were awful - 2 gig hard drives built for 95NT and they stuffed Windows 2000 in it, filling the hard drives to 1.85 gig.

Constant blue screen of death and NO MALWARE protection.

Thankfully I'm not there now, but I was getting calls for help. So I said, "I have a $500 per hour consultation fee", yep, I didn't really but it kept them off my back.

I have the background, I figure I should try and take advantage of it if I can find a wood company that sells these products and helps develop processes as I a guy I know up in Oregon has done. No one is giving any secrets away.

Good name for a company - TWO Suns Setting.