Team Seacats

Although, it does look like one, no, it’s not a bomb. This is an example of a vacuum pump with a home-built resovoir. We’re looking to improve our existing vacuum bagging capabilities and energy consumption and should be able to do it handily with something like this. Currently all our vacuum bagging is done with a venturi style vacuum generator that requires compressed air to operate. It pulls plenty of vacuum but even when the part being made is fully evacuated, the venturi vacuum generator continues to consume the same full amount of compressed air. The solution? Attach it to a vacuum reservoir through a check valve and an electronic vacuum sensing switch that connect to a pneumatic solenoid valve. This way the vacuum generator only “turns on” and consumes compressed air when the vacuum in the system drops below a set point. Even if I were to buy a very expensive mechanical vacuum pump, it would have to run constantly without such a resovoir. We’re fabricating our own reservoir from scrap aluminum and are a little concerned that it might not be beefy enough. If we were building a vessel designed for pressurization, I would have spent an extensive amount of time calculating the loads and putting in a whopping safety factor … but in this case, implosion is not quite as a harmful threat as explosion…so we’re going with the thumb and one eyeball principle. As is though, a quick run with the calculator shows that this thing will have about 18,000 lbs of force pressing inward. I’m going to work on the one meter plug some tomorrow morning and venture over to Neville’s house were we start welding tomorrow evening on the tube and endcaps I rolled this evening.

These guys have instructions, several kits, and/or pieces parts to build your own resevoir system at Veneer Supplies. Cool website.