I know this won't be for everyone and who knows-it may be short lived for me. But, seeing some different threads around, I wanted to give this a try. I have a small shop and don't have a good dust collection system for the various materials that get ground on. This results in me having wood and metal dust on a bunch of surfaces everywhere. So, for what it's worth, here's how I did things.
After doing some research, I decided to go with a pump rather than gravity feed. I picked up a Ryobi wet saw pump at the big box home store and a couple fittings. The guy there was helpful and gave me a couple suggestions. I wanted to be able to adjust the flow without reaching into the bucket of water to turn the little dial. I had a bunch of drip line left over from doing sprinkler stuff in the back yard. Got a little needle valve thing and a little pack with "delrin sleeves" to replace the brass ones in the compression valve (they can cut into the plastic hose).
Replace the little sleeves and tighten everything up.
The little elbow that plugs into the pump posed a problem after opening everything... It was a ways bigger than the drip line, but not big enough for the line to fit inside. I'm sure there's a couple specific adapters that would allow the fit to be just right, but I'm fairly impatient. So...I hunted around the garage and found some fittings, tube, and zip ties. A little time and a bit of filing, and things were working just right.
After testing it all out (and it actually worked), I got it out to the grinder. I zip tied it all together and plugged it in.
I had to help out the pump just a touch, but once it made it all the way up from the floor, it was flowing just fine.
Turned it down and it went to a trickle. Looks like it should work just fine .
I need to work on the mounting of it onto the belt, but that shouldn't be too difficult. Glad I ran into the other threads about this.
More coming
Jeremy Lindley, Apprentice Smith
I think it's finished...mostly. I did some testing and checking and it appears like things will work. I know I'll be fine tuning as things go along, but it seems that it at least works relatively well at the moment. I got some Lexan from the big box store, cut it to size, then used my heat gun to get things warm. Bent it around the top wheel above the platen and let it cool. Bent up some flat bar, drilled holes in both, and bolted them together. I ground down the heads that were sticking through so I could position the guard close to the belt. I used rare earth magnets to hold the bar to the platen and it makes it easy to adjust the angle/position of it. (Noticed later the nuts were vibrating off the bolts, so I added some permanent thread lock to them.)
I used more flat bar and magnets on the tension bar with the drip line. Then I bent up some flashing I had for the gutter to catch any water/spray, since it was sitting around and I also had access to a metal break to make things pretty easy. I drilled a hole in the flat bar to put the drip line through and zip tied the end of the tube to "plug" it. I did some previous testing before cutting the drip line shorter to see what would work. I used some little drill bits and pin vises to put in some holes for the water to drip through. Just a little twist of the valve on and off and it controls the flow. A little fiddling with the Lexan shield and it keeps the water going where I want it. I found out when I position it close enough to the belt, I can actually see the water it catches from flying off gathering in a wide "drop" between the belt and the bottom edge of the Lexan before falling down the face of the platen.
It looks like the metal splash guard is out of alignment, but it's just the angle of the photos.
This was a fairly old/dull belt and when I started grinding to see how it did, things still heated up, though not as quickly as before. Guessing a sharp belt that actually cut vs this one would probably stay cool longer. At a minimum, though the dust will be kept down which is huge for me and my little shop.
I haven't done a significant amount of grinding with the wet setup, but did test it with a few blades. It really does require a small amount of water and the plastic shield helps immensely. Without it close to the belt, it just catches the water and drips down away from the belt, not helping much of anything. I was using an old somewhat dull belt, so the knives still built up heat, requiring me to dunk them, though it wasn't as quick. I'm betting with a sharp belt that was cutting better, the heat wouldn't be nearly as much of a factor. There also wasn't that much water in the metal "gutter" and what was there just evaporated away. As I ground on the blades, I could feel the occasional really small drops of water hitting me, but nothing resembling a rain storm-thankfully <img src=' http://www.americanbladesmith.com/ipboard/public/style_emoticons//smile.gi f' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />.
Jeremy
Jeremy Lindley, Apprentice Smith
