Homemade Black Box type Vac system

**tuffduck** · 04-01-2021, 01:51 PM

After spending months reading through hundreds of threads, I am going down the "rabbit hole." I am using many of the design attributes from the thread started on this forum years ago. I have worked with melamine for years...I hate the stuff. My choice of material is 3/4" PVC. My thoughts on this are: easy to machine, not porous, easy to seal the joints, sound dampening, heavy to help reduce noise and vibration.

The vacuum table size I will be creating will be 48"x42". This works well for my material requirements. The plenum will be made from 1"PVC with a 1" Baltic birch substrate on the bottom to avoid an flexion. The piping will all be done with 2" PVC pipe and a 3" manifold from the vacuum box. For the motors I have decided to go with 2 Ametek Lamb 122178-18 motors for their specs in comparison with others that have been used.

I am sure there are reasons why no one has ever posted pictures of the inside of the new vacuum box model made of steel, although they would be interesting to see.

I have no interest in mass producing this thing if all goes well. There are commercial options out there already. Being in Canada, I can't justify paying what those options would cost here. It is about double what these products are available in the US for.

If anyone would like to offer an suggestions, experiences, photos, ideas. All would be greatly appreciated and welcome to join me on this journey.

**ken_rychlik** · 04-01-2021, 02:18 PM

Go to central vac and look at the shopbot page. I prefer one motor per section over the oem version of several motors per chamber. I'm sure others disagree. I have built about 10 of them. I did other options on material for vac grid and went back to mdf. Cheap, and it works good when sealed all around and supported. I glue the spoilboard and that is an issue with plastic grids.

**KurtR** · 04-03-2021, 08:26 AM

One motor per chamber, what a great idea, I guess you don't need valves then. Just pipe the PVC to the motor and have a switch for each chamber. Brilliant. I like that idea.

**jerry_stanek** · 04-03-2021, 09:02 AM

Originally Posted by KurtR

One motor per chamber, what a great idea, I guess you don't need valves then. Just pipe the PVC to the motor and have a switch for each chamber. Brilliant. I like that idea.

I like the idea of valves and 4 motors for 1 chamber with switches to run 1 2 3 or all 4 motors sometime I need more suction for 1 or 2 zones.