During the course of many discussions with customers, I try to turn it into a bit of a brain storming session. I find this helps get the customer (and me) thinking about all the possibilities for a solution (even if it doesn’t involve our product). Many times the customer is so close to the problem and so focused on it that they can only see one rational way to solve it. They come to us because they think we have a solution that is in line with what they were thinking and want to discuss it. Many times their ideas are right on the money. Other times not so much.

It is for those other times when customers are really grasping at straws to figure out their solution that I begin this brainstorming approach. One common application that we encounter, since we do make blow-off nozzles, is one for clearing or cleaning residue, liquid, chips or some other contaminant off of a work piece. The customer has their first ideas. But then, they mention some small but crucial fact that the debris being blown cannot land on other, adjacent work pieces. They also have concern that the air that is entrained by many  of our products may be saturated with some sort of un-desirable liquid or mist that they do not want re-deposited on the work piece as it may cause problems for some subsequent operation during the assembly of the product, or perhaps long term performance would be compromised.
So, what do you suggest when you have conditions like these with such restrictions?

Thinking about it for a moment, the idea comes………..Use a Line Vac to suck the contamination away and deposit it into some recycling container or other bin for disposal later. That’s it! Vacuuming away the debris doesn’t blow it all over adjacent work pieces, it keeps us from entraining any kind of bad stuff from the ambient environment that might be re-deposited and best of all, contain the debris into a container away from the work area.

Line Vac sucks debris directly from drilling operation.

We have seen this idea work time and again for processes such as bearing cleaning, spline cleaning or broaching where the contaminated work piece is either set into a fixture where vacuum is applied over and around the work piece, or the work piece is lowered into a special vacuum box powered by a Line Vac to clean things up. Normally, Line Vacs are sold for small conveying applications, but with a little stretch of the imagination, you can set them up for other applications that are more of an industrial housekeeping nature within the process. They take up a small envelope of space, are easily controlled with a solenoid valve, can be remote mounted and are quite reasonably quiet when operating.

Line Vac Sucks oil and debris from vacuum cleaning box.

At the risk of using a cliché, the point of the blog is that there is usually more than one way to skin a cat. If given the chance, we believe that you will find our compressed air products offer a very useful and sometimes even creative solution that you never would have thought of because you are too close to the problem.

We can usually boil just about any application down into its most fundamental requirement and determine reasonably well, which of our products will be best to serve as a solution.
Think on it. Sleep on it even. Then give us a chance to lend a helping hand.

Neal Raker
Application Engineer
nealraker@exair.com