The next one that came to my mind was that of a bunch of old guys (my affectionate  name for retirees),  running around with metal detectors, finding everything from old bottle caps to lumps of gold just inches below the surface of the ground.

Jeff only scratched the surface about what he wanted to do but it had to do with a process called “dry washing” river bed gravel or “high bank” as I believe he referred to it. I’m not an “old guy” yet, but this kind of activity, I must say sounded quite interesting, especially with the possibility of a big payoff! My curiosity got the better of me and so, I looked around on the Internet and began to understand this whole process and that there is a community out there for whom this is, at a minimum, a serious hobby.

Dry washing is a process where the prospector has a pile of dry sediment material which consists of various sizes of gravel, sand, silt and hopefully some gold. Dry washing is basically a technique of sizing materials by size and by density so that you end up with a concentration of the finest and most dense material at the end. The concentrated material is further processed with water to hopefully end up with some gold.  I know my description of this process is not quite technically correct, but you get the idea that you have to process a lot of material to get down to a few pieces of gold. Check out this video explaining the process of dry washing.

Another issue that came to the forefront in my research about the dry washing method is that there is no shortage of the “do it yourselfer” types out there constructing their own rigs for this purpose. They range in size from small, manual units up to large, trailer mounted systems that can process many cubic yards of material per hour.

OK, so what does this have to do with my friend Jeff and the Heavy Duty Line Vac? Perhaps you have already guessed it. His interest was in getting the raw material into the dry washer that he had constructed in the first place. Most people feed their dry washer with a shovel or a 5 gallon bucket. On larger machines, this is pretty much a two-man operation to keep the unit fed properly.  And so, with the use of a mobile air compressor, the Heavy Duty Line Vac and some vacuum hose, he could simply vacuum up the material and be free to collect from anywhere he wanted within a 50 ft. radius of his dry washer and keep the dry washer fed with an appropriate amount of material to keep it operating at its optimum throughput.

Yeah, it’s a little out of the ordinary for us around here, but who wants to hear about another, run of the mill conveying application anyway?

Neal Raker
Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com

For some of these applications the discharge port of the hose is just aimed into a bin or some form of a drum without a lid or filter anything to keep dust at bay. In other operations it may be going straight into something as small as a 5 gallon bucket.   Rather than blowing all of this debris, or sand, or dirt into air an open top container and risk it getting stirred up and released into the air, or missing the container and falling onto the floor you could channel it all into one container with one of our Chip Vac Containers.

            The Chip Vac systems are offered in 55 Gallon Drum, 30 Gallon Drums, and a 5 Gallon Container sizes.  Each of these is fitted with an EXAIR .1 micron filter bag that is both washable, and replaceable.  The advantage to using one of these Chip Vac Drum Lid Assemblies is that your debris can be contained into the correctly sized container for your operation and all of the exhaust air will be filtered by the .1 micron bag which means your trimmings, or chips, or sand will all remain in the container rather than blowing out onto the floor or going back into the atmosphere of your shop.

            The 30 Gallon Lid and the 55 Gallon Lid and 5 Gallon Lid all have a 2″ NPT Bung opening that you can adapt to fit your Line Vac hose size.  Pair the lid with a matching size drum dolly and when your drum is full simply remove the lid, wheel the full drum out of the way and a new empty drum in its place.

            We have seen this work in multiple applications as collecting sand from a drilling operation that was being performed on a sand casting, to material trim removal and metal chip removal from machining operations.   If you want more information on these or have a similar application feel free to contact me.

Brian Farno

Application Engineer

BrianFarno@EXAIR.com

In a manner of speaking, the source of the light is embedded within the painted surface itself. When these lines are painted, the paint actually has thousands of small glass beads mixed in with the paint as it is applied to the road. Glass beads have the physical property that they can refract and reflect light back to its source, your headlights. And so the glowing effect is achieved.

What does this have to do with EXAIR? Our 2″ Heavy Duty Line Vac Model 150200 is used to replenish the glass bead hopper on the painting truck from a larger bulk holding tank on another truck. Plenty of compressed air is available on the bulk truck as a 185 CFM compressor is also on board. So, it made perfect sense to be able to use the conveyor. The hopper on the paint truck can easily be re-loaded with about 300 lbs. of bead in less than 10 minutes time. Before, the implementation of the Heavy Duty Line Vac, the customer had to purchase their glass bead in 40 lb. bags and load the hopper manually. A process that took every bit of 1/2 hour with all the climbing and handling of the bags. Model 150200 2″ Heavy Duty Line Vac was selected for its highest available conveying capacity and also for its ability to resist abrasion from product running through the inside and from regular handling during use on the road.

With the new set up, the feed truck can easily pull up along side the painting vehicle, throw the hose into the hopper, turn on the compressed air and it is that easy. No more bags to deal with, no more spillage, no more risking operators climbing up and down from the feed hopper to load it.

Neal Raker
Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com

In this scenario, the customer has to empty the bottles and get the product back into their packaging machine hopper. Besides being a real pain to have to open each bottle and empty, the customer also has to get these tablets back up into the packaging machine. The tool they decided to use was our 1-1/4″ 316 Stainless Steel Line Vac. The Line Vac had to be made of 316 stainless in order to be considered a normally accepted material for use in applications dealing with medications. The FDA regulates this.

The facts that the 316 stainless Line Vac was a normally stocked item for us and also that it was meant exactly for this type of “bucket and ladder” type conveying application made it a perfect fit for this particular application.

If you are in the pharmaceutical packaging business and can recall where you may have had similar applications for packaging, let us know.

Neal Raker
Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com