Official Luthiers Forum!

Has anyone checked out those new Grizzly Cyclone Dust Collection Systems? They look like they were made to compete head to head with Onieda. I was curious, has anyone bought one of these, or been able to do any kinds of hands on comparison?

They certainly are cheaper than the Onieda systems.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

i've not had any experience with the grizzley, but have bought the penn state planes to build one. not an overly difficult job and does save a bit of cash. i think the penn state ready built systems fit between the grizz and oneida pricewise. there is a lot of information about building them as well as sizing a system here:

   http://billpentz.com//woodworking/cyclone/ index.cfm

his ideas helped improve my dust collection a great deal.

Brock,

I also have been considering the Grizzly system. If you read the data about Grizzly on the BillPentz website listed above, it's not very favorable. Here's the review from the site based on the 2003 model. I'm not sure what has changed but maybe they've improved it:



"This cyclone continues to puzzle me. It clearly is designed to do one thing, pick up the larger wood chips without addressing the fine most unhealthy dust and should be located outside the shop based upon its coarse filter bags. Even with Grizzly upgrading from their original 12" to a 13" impeller, the result is way too small to power three 4" inlets. This should have two 6" adapters. The 4" ducting is just not ample to move the CFM that our air engineering tables tell us is required to collect the fine dust at our larger machines. This unit appears to still be air starved with the motor going to work well below rated capacity in many shops".


It looks like they really endorse the Woodsucker II cyclone which is about the same price as the Grizzly, just rated much better.

Let me know what you decide. I'll be buying mine before the end of summer.

John

The new Grizzley is far different from their old one. It looks like they sat down at Bill Pentz's web site and took notes. Be interesting to find a hands-on assesment of the system. Any review from 2003 would be out of date.EricKeller38495.5769560185

Yeah, these look to be redesigned, and remove "99.9% of particles .2 - 2 microns" (if you believe the brochure copy).

But so many of the dust collection products on the market have over hyped performance capacity, it is tough to know unless you can see hard data, or compare them side by side.

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Brock Poling
Columbus, Ohio
http://www.polingguitars.com

Here's a link to Bill Pentz's website for those who (like me) were wondering.

I doubt you'll find any reviews yet. When I went to their showroom last week, they weren't there yet. They said the first shipment was still on the boat but due any day. On paper they are comparable to the Oneida.

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Scott Thompson
Port Townsend,WA

"In a perfect world we'd all sing in tune
But this is reality so give me some room"
-Billy Bragg

I might be headed up to the Pennsylvania location this weekend, I sold my tablesaw and I'm having tablesaw withdrawals already

There has been a lot of discussion about both the new Grizzly and the new Oneida models on the woodnet forum recently. You can find them at www.forums.woodnet.net
Both look pretty good. I've seen a couple favorable reveiws of Oneida's new DC. I don't think any of the Grizzly's have been delivered. Both look to be excellent deals.

Joe Volin

I built my Cyclone seperator from plans that were in a Shop Notes magazine about 15 years ago. It has functioned flawlessly with the help of a 700 cfm Harbor Freight vacuum motor. The big chips fall into a 30 gallon wooden hopper and the dust falls into a removeable drawer, in the bottom of my filter box, [which only needs emptied about once a year]. The chip hopper gets emptied a LOT more often than the dust drawer

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tim...
http://www.mcknightguitars.com