The big Plasma Cutting debate, Water Tables vs Downdraft Tables. Which works best for your application. Chris Phillip from AKS Cutting Systems breaks down the pros and cons of each. He also talks about how plasma tables work, as well as how AKS became one of the first Cutting table manufactures in the USA.
Narrator: Welcome to the Dusty Jobs Podcast from Imperial Systems. Industry knowledge to make your job easier and safer.
Donovan: Good afternoon, and welcome to Imperial Systems Podcast. We’re here again. We’re glad to have Chris Phillip with us from AKS. How are you doing today Chris?
Chris: Good. Good. I’m doing well. We drove in this morning from just north of here and had a nice little factory tour. It’s just a good day. It’s finally somewhat spring-y out. That’s an advantage.
Donovan: Yeah, nice weather day today. We’ve been working with you guys on different products for how many years now, with AKS?
Chris: Probably since really your inception into dust collection and plasma, I believe. So four or five years now, at least.
Donovan: We’ve had a good long relationship, you could say. For everybody out there listening who doesn’t know who you are, or who AKS, how about you give us a little bit of background on yourself. Let’s start out with you. Tell us about yourself first and then tell us about AKS.
Chris: Sure. So, I’m Chris Phillip. I’m one of the regional sales managers AKS Cutting Systems and my territory is eastern PA, so starting at State College and going east, Maryland up to Maine and New York State. In that territory I manage somewhere around, on a good day seven to eight dealers, on a bad day three or four dealers, depending on who’s doing their job that day. That’s what I do. I drive around. I live in Cleveland, Ohio, right about twelve minutes from our factory. I drive around and fly around and go meet new people who want to get into the world of plasma cutting or want to get into the world of laser cutting and really need a plasma table or people who want to get a waterjet as well. That’s also a world I dabble in as well.
AKS has been around now for, boy, 120 years. My great-grandfather purchased the business in the late forties I think is the most accurate story I’ve heard so far, and my grandfather, Dale Phillip, ran the business for fifty years. Maybe a little longer than that, somewhere around there. My dad, three or four years ago, took over the presidency. My grandfather is still CEO of the company, and I got out of that office as fast as possible and got on the road. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I love being on the road.
Donovan: You could say plasmas in your blood almost.
Chris: Yeah.
Donovan: Not technically. Not actually.
Chris: Actually, technically, it can.
Donovan: Oh, that’s true!
Chris: Theres plasma in your blood. You need it there. That’s actually a really great little story. When my grandfather first got into the plasma industry, a guy called him out of Luxembourg or something. Somewhere – Switzerland or something. He said, “Hey, have you ever worked with plasma before?” We made automotive assembly lines. We made gauges to measure distribution caps for airbag deployment, any kind of gauges for nuclear rod insertion systems, making high speed battery assembly lines…we were all over the place. Imploding torpedos with liquid helium, all sorts of random stuff. We were the essence of a job shop. The guy called him and said, “Hey have you ever done anything with plasma?” This is like in the early 80s.
So my grandfather says, “No, we don’t do anything in the medical business.” He didn’t even know that plasma was a thing that you could cut with. Obviously now everybody knows that plasma is one of the three main technologies that you use to cut steel, and stainless steel, and aluminum plate. When we started in this twenty-five, well, boy, thirty-five years ago now, we had no idea what we were doing.
Donovan: Thirty-five years ago you guys were probably one of the first ones in the states to be using this technology.
Chris: Definitely. We were actually exporting them to Europe because for some reason the European market place started using CNC cutting technology. It seems at least to me a little bit quicker than the United States steel processing centers. Now it’s everywhere. Now we have over 1,500 installations and we make 100 or 120 machines a year.
Donovan: Now, when you say 120 – because you guys carry a variety of different types of machines, correct?
Chris: Yeah.
Donovan: So you’re talking total machines, or are we talking about just plasma tables? What are we talking about?
Chris: Yeah, total machines. For every five plasma tables we sell, we sell about one waterjet, which is in line with the market distribution as well. When you look at how many waterjets are sold nationally and how many plasma tables are sold nationally that’s about the ratio as well.
Donovan: So, kind of like your grandfather, when I see a plasma table working I am like, “How does this thing even do what it’s doing?” It’s interesting to watch it cut, and you’re like, “What is going on here?” Now, can you tell us, for people that are a little bit ignorant like me what is the actual technology? What is it doing there?
Chris: No, I can’t, because even after doing this and living in it I’m still pretty amazed by it every day that I see it. I can give you a rough metaphor of what it’s doing. You’re taking a tremendous amount of energy. Usually it’s 480V 3 phase, 67 amps. So, a lot of power, maybe 70 kW of power into this system. So, you think your lasers in the world – if you get a 10 kW laser, wow. That’s big time. That’s big time. You’re cutting half inch plate. We’re taking seven times that and we’re putting it into an area about this big, maybe an eighth of an inch big.
How it gets there is kind of interesting though. So you get this three wave form electricity, AC electricity coming into your shop. It’s going like this through the air, and there’s this device called a chopper. It’s actually a really old piece of technology, but because of the power levels that you’re dealing with you’ve got to use them. It’s the only thing that’s robust enough to deal with this. What the chopper does is kind of like what the power supply on your laptop does. It takes that AC power and turns it into DC. So it actually chops up those waveforms – that’s why it’s called a chopper – and it makes it into a nice positive line. Hopefully. That’s the idea, unless you’ve got dirty power. That’s a separate conversation. We then take that and somehow it gets from the power supply, the big black box that Hypertherm makes. That box is 80% chopper. That’s the big thing that you’re buying in there, and then a lot of oscilloscopes and other pieces of technology to make sure that line is as straight as it can be.
Donovan: So 80% percent chopper, 20% magic?
Chris: Yup. Yeah. Somewhere…20, 25, maybe it’s over 100%. I’m not sure but its a lot. Then that goes into the torch body, and I’m definitely cutting out a lot of parts here but there’s high frequency stuff that’s going on. It gets to the torch body. It gets to the nozzle, to the electrode, and that electrode. That’s basically, I believe it’s the cathode in this relationship. It’s going to start arcing back and forth, and then you run a gas through it, and the gas turns into plasma. So plasmas the fourth state of matter, right? So that gas…you know, you’ve got solid, liquid, gas, plasma. When you super excite a gas with electricity, 60,000 watts of electricity in area this big, that’s a way to get that going. You do that and then run a gas through it at a high pressure and that gas actually becomes magnetic as it turns into a plasma. That wants to then grab something, right? It’s magnetic. So it grabs the steel plate that’s right below it. When it hits that steel plate, that 70,000 watts of power is also the temperature of the surface of the sun.
Donovan: Wow.
Chris: So, it doesn’t just melt it. It actually ionizes the material. It changes state again and turns it basically into electricity, at least a small portion of that material. Most of it gets melted, and then you have 150 psi assist gas that comes out that then actually blows the material out of the way. That’s basically the gist of how plasma works. We’re taking super high voltage electricity, arcing it, running a gas through it, and letting it do it’s thing.
Donovan: In a controlled pattern.
Chris: In as controlled as we can get, yeah. That’s the part that people always want to know. They say, “What’s the accuracy of your plasma table?” They’ve got three machining centers. “What’s the accuracy of your plasma table? Can it hold five tenths? Can it hold ten tenths?” The answer is imagine trying to hold a candle, and you want to know where that flame is. It’s really, really hard. Theres ways to do it. You can measure it, but it’s tricky. Obviously just like a candle one of the byproducts of having that flame is a lot of dust.
Donovan: Well, yeah.
Chris: Which takes us to the reason why we’re here on the Imperial podcast.
Donovan: That’s where we step in and start helping out with that. Now, from my base knowledge on plasma tables and boy I have a lot more know from just that conversation.
Chris: It’s all wrong. It’s all wrong. Any service technicians that are listening right now just close your ears to that last five minutes. It’s going to hurt.
Donovan: As that chemical process is happening that’s allowing that to cut that metal there’s obviously some byproducts and that’s what we’re talking about. There’s smoke, and from what I understand there’s two ways that basically the industry uses to capture that. That’s a bed of water underneath it or actual sucking that smoke down through the table. Is that…am I getting anything wrong here?
Chris: That’s the two methods that I know of. The third method is you just don’t care enough and you let it fill up your shop.
Donovan: I’m sure you’ve been in some shop…
Chris: It gets interesting. You don’t want to be in those for too long.
Donovan: I know we had one time out here where for some reason when someone changed the filters in our own collector they forgot to engage them so they were actually up tight and we had some blow through on our plasmasmoke and very quickly we knew in our shop as everything started to turn orange that we had done something wrong.
Chris: You guys cut a lot of mild steel so that definitely makes sense. It’s interesting. You can actually tell what product you’re cutting or what material you’re cutting based on the color of the smoke. Your aluminums its going to be a whiter smoke and on your mild steels, your carbon-based steels it’s orange. What is burning metal? We all know what burning metal really is. It’s oxidation. It is extremely accelerated oxidation. So what you’ve got there, the byproduct of cutting this material, along with the slag that falls off and the part that’s made, that stuff that isn’t there had to go somewhere. I know there’s a lot of magic in the box. But there’s not much magic on the table. That’s pretty simple. The answer to that is that it oxidizes and it becomes that smoke. The reason it looks all orange is because or rust. It’s rust. It’s rust flakes that are flying everywhere through the air. They’re just a lot smaller than what you consider rust.
Donovan: Well, that makes a lot of sense. So, when we’re talking about the water based tables and we’re talking about the air based tables, can you kind of tell us a little bit…I mean I’m sure each one has some advantages, some disadvantages. Can you tell us a little bit more and unpack if someone’s listening to this and trying to decide if they should get a water based table or “Should I get an air based table?” What would be some things that they should think about?
Chris: Well, I’ll prep that question by saying that I am, and this is no accolade to Imperial, I’m 100% downdraft.
Donovan: Gotcha.
Chris: 100% downdraft, and the reason being is because of that idea that we started with this conversation. Controlling the candle. We’ve figured out that you can just have a candle waving in the air. You can have a plasma torch that’s just doing it’s thing like we did back in the early 80s when we didn’t really know what we were doing. Since then there has been all sorts of developments. There is the different PSI assist gas. You can take that candle flame and if you run a high speed current of air up the side of that candle, guess what? You stabilize that candle flame, right? It’s called a shield gas. Same thing that we do. We run a cut gas that gets electrified and turned into the plasma arc. Then there is also a gas on the outside of that, just like a welder does, that isolates that gas, the plasma arc, from ambient air. We don’t really know what’s in the ambient. Theres a lot of nitrogen. Theres other stuff. Who knows? By doing that, by isolating that flame from atmosphere, you really include the quality of your cut.
Donovan: Right, it gives it more of a controlled environment to live in. You’re saying on a downdraft table then that helps assist with that, right?
Chris: We’re getting there. We’re getting closer. So after they did those types of shield gas type things, they were still cutting, plus or minus, twenty, twenty five thousandths of an inch. Maybe more than that. Fifty thousandths of an inch. You think it’s minuscule but a human hair is about five thousandths of an inch. So we’re cutting hairs here, literally. That’s what they were living at when they started doing that. They started looking at other variables. What else can we change? At that point, basically everybody was using a water table. They just said, “It captures it and it works.” Somebody eventually had the idea of, “Well, we know that by cutting this we are obviously causing a lot of thermal changes in the material, and maybe if that was more consistent we would cut better.” Meaning, “Why are we quenching the bottom of the plate with water?” This is a thermal process. We’re melting stuff. What if we just let air be underneath the plate? That improved the quality of cutting. You don’t get as much dross. When you cut the material, obviously some of it is liquid and it’s going to build on the bottom of the plate. If you cool it right away, more of it’s going to build on the bottom of the plate. Makes sense, right?
Donovan: Yup.
Chris: Also, it causes more thermal things to occur with the material. So, in my experience across the board, if I want to show somebody a really good part…you know, the system we have in our facility, when we cut samples for customers all day long, it’s a downdraft system, 110%. It would never be a water table.
Donovan: I got you, because you just get a little more of an accurate cut. You get a better cut.
Chris: I’ve had this conversation, obviously, literally a couple hundred times with people trying to decide between a water table and a downdraft table. I should say this. There are two huge factors in determining where a customer is actually going to end up between plasma and water jet. The first one is their space. Huge. In the plasma world the dust collector is honestly kind of seen as a pain, you know? I’ve got this big thing that I’ve got to deal with. It takes filters. I’ve got to do stuff to it. For some reason a lot of these guys look at the water table and they say, “Oh, I just fill it up with a hose and you’re good to go.” Then they’re surprised when somebody knocks on their door and says, “Hey, have you bought your 5,000 gallons of plasma table additive to add to your water every month to keep it from becoming a cesspool in the middle of your shop? “Whoa, what’s this?” So that’s definitely a big thing, that people think that it’s easier to have a water table.
Donovan: I think a lot of people don’t – once the water is in there, it’s hard to know what to do to get rid of it, too. I know we’ve had some calls like that in our own facility. We don’t deal with that so we’re not really experts.
Chris: What do you say to that?
Donovan: We say that they have to contact someone else that’s a hazardous waste manufacturer or disposal. “We’re not able to help you with that. Sorry.” If you want to get a downdraft table we know what to do with those filters when they’re done. That’s another question we usually get, what to do with this water. The best answer I’ve come up with, I don’t know if you know a better one, is to contact your local hazardous waste disposal people.
Chris: Yeah, you can actually contact a sewer cleaning company.
Donovan: Oh, okay.
Chris: They’ll bring in a pump truck and they’ll take an eight inch hose set up on some diaphragm pump, and they’ll take that eight inch hose and suck out your whole table dry in about forty five seconds, as long as they can access the table. They have to be able to back a truck up through your shop, and that’s usually the catching point because if somebody buys a water table, one of the bigger reasons why they want to do that is space. Two big factors: space, and the other one I actually haven’t gotten to yet, but it’s what they’ve already owned in the past. Usually if they’re buying it, it’s because they have piles of steel everywhere. Theres two rolling machines in the way. Theres a brake and there’s no way they can get a truck to the table. So they say, “That’s great. What else?” The answer to that is buy yourself a little sump pump, put it in there, get a 55 gallon bucket, and start pumping that thing out and dumping it down the drain until you have a wet sludge of empty table and then you have to go in there. Maybe if you have a guy who might be on his way out the door or something you can tell him to go clean out the water table because I wouldn’t want to do it. You’re just left with the gunk that builds up in the table that’s sat there for maybe a year with the water stagnant and all the drop outs and stuff. It gets gross. You can do it. People do it all the time. A lot of people still do it. The reason a lot of people do it is that second reason. It’s what they know. A lot of people if they had a water table they’re just going to get another water table. They don’t see the up front cost of a dust collector as advantageous because they’re blind to the dross they’re dealing with, the extra rust that they’re dealing with, all the extra stuff that the downdraft system helps alleviate the cost of down the line.
Donovan: Yeah, if you don’t know, you don’t know. So, do you feel like we’ve covered everything with the downdraft table setup? You know more than I do. If theres anything else out there that might be good for someone to know.
Chris: Yeah, I mean, I guess the only other thing that people definitely worry about with downdraft systems is the possibilities of explosions. That’s obviously a big thing, especially when you’re cutting aluminum. Powdered aluminum is literally what’s used to make military grade explosives. So, one of the byproducts of cutting aluminum on a table is powdered aluminum, basically. It’s the dust that’s created from the cutting, that white dust. With your spark arrestor properly maintained and the systems that you guys have offered, we cannot say with the couple hundred installations that we have that we have had an issue with the system being maintained and used they way it should be. The spark arrestor in particular is…I was just poking around and if you haven’t seen one on the inside look it up. They have some good cross sections on Imperial’s website. You can’t drop big drops into it. You’ve got to clean it out once in a while. That can be hard to get people to accept once in a while. If you maintain it, it shouldn’t be an issue.
Donovan: That’s why we build the clean out door on it, so you can do that, so you can inspect it. Everyone’s inspection level is different and how often you need to do it. Some of that comes down to the operation. Sometimes that comes down to the operator on that piece of equipment. You’re right. It’s good to poke your head into that every once in a while and make sure it’s good whether it’s every six months…we always, and I’m sure you guys do too, we always encourage preventative maintenance on everything. That’s with every piece of equipment you have in the shop. Anybody who’s running a shop knows that you’ve got to look at stuff every once in a while, right?
Okay, so, wet versus dry, I think we’ve got a really good feel for that, where we’re at, what the industry is like. So, I’m going to ask you a question and I know you’re not a doctor. I’m not a doctor, but one of the big questions we get people looking up is plasma smoke. What is the health implications for that, if I’m breathing that in? People get worried about that. I’m sure you’ve gotten asked that question too, being what you do for years and years and years. I’d love to hear what your answer is on that.
Chris: Cutting stainless steel in particular is a known carcinogen. That’s something that is factually know. You don’t want to breathe in the dust that’s creating from cutting stainless steel. Hexochromium variant gas, that’s the byproduct. Apparently that means its bad for you.
Donovan: *laughing* The name is just scary itself.
Chris: Aluminum, one of the byproducts of aluminum is hydrogen gas, which, something I didn’t touch on with a water table is with aluminum, you get hydrogen gas build up under the plate. That will eventually blow up. You’re worried about your dust collector blowing up once every fifteen years. If you don’t have a properly maintained bubbler system inside your water table you could have an explosion once a week on that. I actually saw one where a quarter inch plate of aluminum, they hit a pocket of hydrogen gas underneath it, and it looked like a thanker when through it. It hit the beam. The beam lifted up. It was a lot of, “Whoa, that was neat.”
Donovan: We’ll just pause here for a second on the dangers of smoke and I want to talk about one thing. If you have a wet table, are you saying that still doesn’t collect everything that the byproducts are? Are you saying you still might need a ventilation system on that? You’ve seen a lot more of these in the field. You’re talking about it could possibly blow up. Is that something that even on a wet table you might still want to consider? I’m going to let you speak to that.
Chris: Sure, definitely. In an ideal setting, if you’re using your water table properly, meaning you’re running your water about half way up the side of your plate. It has an internal bladder system so when you take your one inch plate of steel and you put it on it, it is up to the bottom of the plate. That’s really important. You can’t have a gap. You can’t have an air gap there. If you have an air gap, the smoke just goes out from underneath the plate and you might as well not have anything. So you’ve got to keep that water up. Well, by having that water up then you deal with all the issues that the guys down the line don’t want. That after the pain of a capital expense up front goes away, your production guys say, “Well every part I get off this machine has dross on it, and there’s flash rust on the bottom. Lower the water.” So they lower the water just a little bit. Now their dust collection went down from 95% or so to like 10%, but their parts turn out great. They say, “Well, I have a water table, so let’s just not worry about it. Theres a lot less dross because you’re not quenching the slag as it comes off the part. You’re running a current through steel in water. You get rust, right?
Donovan: Right.
Chris: You can flash rust a part in a couple seconds, especially when it’s submerged in water. You can literally watch the rust grow on a piece of steel. It’s kind of wild.
Donovan: So you’re saying when people do that, when they drop that water level then…
Chris: Yeah, then they’re not even using the water table. They have the water table. They’re maintaining it. They’re cleaning it. They’re doing everything they need to do. They paid more for the water table on the base system than a downdraft system, at least the ones I sell. Our downdraft tables are cheaper than our water tables. But you still have smoke that gets out. So now you’re dealing with all the negatives of the capital costs of a water table and very few of the positives. That’s after six months. You got back into a shop and sure enough, you see that they’re running it below where they should.
Donovan: We’ll just throw this out there. If that happens, and you guys need some other type of collection system, Chris, you can definitely help them out with that. You can help them figure out a solution for that. Whether it’s a hood, whether it’s whatever…
Chris: I liked your ambient system out there in your factory. That’s a nice system.
Donovan: It’s working really well for us.
Chris: I could see that in a lot of shops.
Donovan: It’s a good solution. We’ve talked about that on a previous episode with Jeremiah, so if anybody is listening and they want to go back and look at industrial setups that’s one of the things. You can go back to that podcast episode and listen to that and Jeremiah can walk you through what an ambient system is. Alright, so that dangers of plasma – we’re coming back around to the health implications. So, a lot of it comes down to what you’re cutting.
Chris: Yeah, at the end of the day I don’t know if mild steel smoke is actually poisonous. You know, like you said, we’re not doctors, but I’ve watched guys have to breathe it in and it looks a lot like welding fumes and it doesn’t look nice. You can be around a plasma table and watch it cut one inch plate for five minutes and literally watch smoke billow off the table in rolling fumes. This stuff, you’ll watch it settle, and everything around you, the whole shop is covered in orange. It can’t be good for your lungs. I can’t believe it would be. You know, if you walk away from something coughing…
Donovan: That’s probably a good indicator.
Chris: Yeah:
Donovan: Well, Chris, I think we’ve talked a lot about how different tables work and everything. Is there anything else that you think people should know about out there or can you think of anything else we haven’t touched on that might be beneficial?
Chris: Yeah, sure. So, the last thing that I leave you with is understanding that when you’re making this decision between a water table or a downdraft system we’re in between technologies. Laser cutting or plasma cutting, all that type of stuff…get samples. Get samples from your supplier, honestly. I can get you some samples cut on a water table or cut on a downdraft system and there’s notable differences. When you hand those to an operations guy and he looks at those two parts and he says, “Well this one is going to take me five minutes of grinding to prep. This ones going to take me thirty seconds to prep.” That’s the game. That’s it. Those five minutes add up very quickly. All of a sudden you’re employing two more people just to grind the parts because the water table is set too low and you’re not even collecting the dust anyways and you’re dealing with bad parts. I think the water table back in the day made sense, but now we’ve gotten all these other variable solved to the point that we’re looking for other things. The next variable is sticking with downdraft.
Donovan: And efficiency and just trying to…if they’re trained to weld, you want them to be welding. You know what I mean? You don’t want them to be messing with parts more than they have to. You want them to do the job you’re paying them to do. I get it. Uptime, productive time, is helping people make money. That’s what you guys want to do, that’s what we want to do. We want people to be productive, and we want them to be in the healthiest and safest environment that they can. That’s what we’re trying to do on this podcast is help people understand what’s a good decision for them to be healthy. That’s what you guys are doing over at AKS, trying to create a good, healthy shop environment.
Chris: Definitely.
Donovan: Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. Everyone who is listening, you can check us out on social media. You can like, subscribe, check us out there. AKS, do you guys have a lot of social media?
Chris: Yeah, we have all that stuff too.
Donovan: So find us all on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, all of that. Chris is glad to talk to you. I’m glad to talk to you if you have any questions. You can check us out there. Until next time, stay healthy, stay safe and we’ll be looking forward to talking to you again.
Chris: You go it. Thank you for having me on.
Donovan: Yup, thanks for coming.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Dusty Jobs Podcast. Breathe better, work safer.
For many businesses, summer brings vacations, holiday weekends, and summer maintenance shutdowns. While you’re checking and maintaining your other equipment, why not also give your dust collector a summer shutdown checkup?
In the lovely winters of western Pennsylvania where we’re located, nobody wants to be outside changing filters in the freezing rain. So, if your location has winters like ours, consider doing your dust collector maintenance during a summer shutdown.
The biggest advantage of doing your maintenance in the summer is that, well, it’s summer. Plus, many companies have downtime over the July 4th holiday and do all their shutdown work then. However you do it, plan ahead so you’re not doing it in the snow.
MAKING A PLAN FOR SUMMER FILTER CHANGEOUTS
With cold weather hanging on for what seems like an eternity, summer might seem like a distant daydream. But it’s going to happen faster than we think, so now is a good time to start planning.
You certainly don’t want to reach your shutdown time and find out that you need new filters. If you’re ordering filters for your Imperial Systems dust collector, we usually (but not always) have them in stock. Otherwise, some filters have a lead time of several weeks.
We never want to have a customer frustrated because their filters won’t arrive in time for their July 4th shutdown. Therefore, we will help you get your order ahead of time so you have them in stock when changeout time comes.
OTHER SUMMER SHUTDOWN CHECKUPS
It’s the right time of year to check your differential pressure gauge if you haven’t checked it lately. If the differential pressure gauge is reading close to 5”, it’s time to order replacement filters.
Inspect the diaphragm valves for damage or leaks. We can assist you with replacement kits. But ordering them before you actually need them will make sure you’ve got them on hand.
There’s also a small filter called the gauge or intake filter. This should be replaced every time the cartridge filters get replaced. But if you’re not sure where to find this on your equipment, contact us and we’ll help you.
Another neglected part, the airlock needs a little care as well. To meet NFPA standards, airlock wipers need to maintain a seal as they rotate. Some people change their airlock wipers each year, which we recommend. Meanwhile, some people have NEVER changed their airlock wipers. They just don’t know that they need to be changed. If it’s been a while since you took a look at those wipers, check to make sure they aren’t worn or damaged.
If you’re going to replace your airlock wipers, we recommend that you buy a set of bearings at the same time. Regardless of how careful you are, these bearings often break while you’re changing the wipers. So, make sure you don’t get caught with brand new wipers and broken bearings. In short, add them to your plan.
YOUR TIME MATTERS
You probably don’t have much time to shut down your dust collector for maintenance during most of the year. After all, that might mean shutting down some major parts of production. Many companies have a shutdown in the summer. Therefore, now’s a good time for you to get ready and order those parts as soon as you can.
If you need help inspecting or figuring out what you need, we’re here for you. Schedule a visit from our ServiceMAXX team or check out our Dust Collector Maintenance Checklist. Our ServiceMAXX team can also help you with your summer maintenance projects. But call now, because they’ll be booked fast!
AFTERMARKET FILTERS
Ready to start preparing for summer shutdown? Fill out the form below to receive a filter quote from our aftermarket team.
Did you know that we have one of the largest powder coat ovens in the region? This allows us to powder coat all of our equipment. As a bonus we are the only manufacturer in the United States that can offer a powder coated baghouse. There are 10 color options that are available as a standard and additional colors are be available upon request. See your sales engineer for additional information on non-standard colors. Unless otherwise specified all dust collectors are painted Slate Gray with a Sky Blue header tank. Any of the stock colors can be used for any of our equipment. Check out all the options below.
In this very informative episode of the Dusty Jobs Podcast, Donovan is joined by two guests, Russ Ryland and Jeremiah Wann. They talk about what to do in case of a fire. Russ also gives tips about preventative maintenance that you can do to give your filters more life. Also they speak briefly on the ServiceMAXX team and how they will help you with any issue on any brand of dust collector.
Narrator: Welcome to the Dusty Jobs Podcast from Imperial Systems. Industry knowledge to make your job easier and safer.
Donovan: Thanks again for joining us and welcome to another Dusty Jobs podcast. We’re excited. We have a couple guests today. We’ve got Russ Ryland, our head service tech, and Jeremiah Wann, the owner of our company. How are you doing Jeremiah?
Jeremiah: I’m doing well. Thanks.
Donovan: Do you have anything you want to say about this podcast?
Jeremiah: We were just talking earlier that this is our first multi-person podcast. Hopefully it will be a little bit more enjoyable and relaxing. When I do it I’m usually uptight and super nervous. I’m going for fun today. We’ll see what happens.
Donovan: More than just me talking too. Russ how are you feeling today?
Russ: Doing good.
Donovan: You doing good? I know Russ would prefer climbing in a machine and fixing it, probably, than being in the office. That’s his M.O. He’s always out in the field, always traveling and helping people out. We really appreciate that here. The wealth of knowledge, the wealth of…well, I’ll stop talking about it. Why don’t you tell me about yourself Russ. How long have you been doing this type of work?
Russ: Well, I’ve been working for Imperial Systems for seventeen and half years now. I’ve kind of held many positions throughout the company and just worked up to running our service department and taking care of our customers.
Donovan: Now, you’ve got to tell this story, because I think it’s great. Tell us how you got started with Imperial Systems.
Russ: Well, I was going to school at night for mechanical engineering and technology and working at CCX at the time. They made some changes that was going to interfere with my school schedule. So I called Jeremiah up on my lunch break and told him that he’s going to hire me and I’m going to start in two weeks.
Jeremiah: That’s his version of it.
Donovan: Let’s hear your version of how this came on.
Jeremiah: I don’t remember the phone call. I don’t remember that. I just remember sitting around a campfire…
Donovan: Did he just show up one day?
Jeremiah: Kind of. No, I just remember that that was in 2002 maybe…
Russ: 2003
Jeremiah: You have to put it in context. I had a third bedroom office in my house. No customers. I couldn’t pay my own mortgage basically. We had, I think, about two guys in the shop, including myself. So I’d go into the midnight shift and work after I’d get done selling all day. Russ and I were just hanging out all the time. We just did everything together. So we were at my cousin’s bonfire one night, which is a western Pennsylvania thing if you’re not familiar with that. It’s pretty common around here. At our age it was common. I don’t do it too much anymore. One night we were just kind of sitting around the bonfire and he said, “I quit my job. When am I starting?”
And I’m like, “What?”
So I said, “Of course you’re starting but I don’t know how I’m going to pay you.” Real quick on that though, he came to work for me a few months later, and we laid him off and pretty much everyone else because we just didn’t have any work at the moment. So I was over at his house and his mom comes out and says something about, “Oh, Russ made more money on unemployment than he did working for you.” Thanks Ms. Ryland. That’s my version of it.
Donovan: Well, I know this from being able to interact with Russ and having him close by and being able to pick up the phone. I am glad he came back after unemployment and stuck it out because man he’s just such a valuable resource we have here with his knowledge. Russ you’ve been not only working on our collectors but you’ve been in – how many different types of collectors do you think you’ve worked on over the years?
Russ: Just about every brand you can imagine. I mean, I’ve been in some from the 50s. So, yeah, about every brand you can imagine, every style of collector out there at some point in time I’ve dealt with. Whether we’re just trying to help a customer repair what they have existing or just evaluate and see whether it’s even practical to fix on some of them.
Donovan: I think some people don’t know that. When they think of Imperial Systems or they think of what we do here they think we just build dust collectors. We’re more than that, man. We do full system work, full system design. Even if you get that machine out there and you need someone to come and help you turn it on and start it up. Russ is the guy that would be there, or Connor. We have a team of people who can go out and help do that. That’s why we have him on today to just help bring more knowledge to that that we’re not just building collectors and putting them out there. We’re full service and full everything here. The other thing is we’re going to give a little free advice today too. We’re going to give a little free knowledge. We’re going to let Russ handle maybe a few of those phone calls we get 100 times and just put it out here now so people can listen. So, we’re going to dive into a couple issues. Issue number one, Russ: fire. A lot of people have dust collector fires. What do you see? When you normally show up at a dust collector fire, what is the main cause of that that you see a lot of the time?
Russ: Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint. Usually it’s some type of spark that got in the system or something hot depending on the source and the process that the plant is under. In wood applications it can be sanders. If the belt on a sander breaks and is on fire, I’ve seen that. In the metal cutting industries its usually sparks from plasma cutting or grinding. Those are usually the biggest culprits on those. Heck I saw one blast machine where they fed wood into it from a pallet.
Jeremiah: I was at that one numerous times.
Donovan: They just put the whole thing in there?
Russ: The whole pallet with the parts and it vaporized the pallet basically.
Donovan: I can imagine. I can imagine. So, once you arrive on the scene and there’s been a fire, what’s the first thing you’re looking at? What do you evaluate? Obviously by the time you arrive there the fire is out, the collector has cooled down. When you show up what are you looking at? What are the things you’re trying to assess on that machine to see where the damage is? Where do you see most of the damage in those situations?
Russ: The first thing you see is the paint job on the collector. Did it get hot enough to melt all the paint off? If it melted all the paint off, that’s telling you that the seals between all the joints could have possibly melted away. So that’s first. The overall condition when you first see the collector. If the paint is fairly intact then a lot of the gasketing probably survived. Then you just go from there to where you start looking at the tube sheet to see if the filters can seal against it still.
Donovan: You’re saying in a high heat situation you get warping? Is that what you see?
Russ: You can. You can have some warping in the tube sheet from immense heat. It all depends on how intense the fire was.
Donovan: A mild fire might just need new filters but at some point you might need a whole new system.
Jeremiah: Yeah, the lift mechanisms, whatever holds the filter in might warp. They might be shot. The door might be warped. The CMAXX has a very heavy door but its big so if it warps its either going to need to be adjusted or replaced depending on how hot the fire is, for sure.
Donovan: And I know this: The number one way to save your collector is just not to have a fire in it, right?
Russ: Yup.
Donovan: So, Russ has been here for a lot of it, and the other thing we didn’t talk about is how Russ helps with our R&D too. He really helps develop products. I think you and Jeremiah both were the ones who came up with our Spark Trap. You guys kind of worked on that together.
Jeremiah: I think so.
Russ: Yeah.
Jeremiah: Before we get into that though I want to go back to the fires. One of the important things that people don’t realize when they have a fire is that nobody is ever prepared for it. Somebody from the office looks out and there’s smoke pouring out of the dust collector or there’s smoke coming back in the plant or from the return air because a filters on fire. So what do you do? We’ve seen cases where people have gone up there and literally opened up the door and tried to put it out. These can be metal fires that you can’t put water on. You might have to put some type of an agent on there or CO2 or something like that to get it knocked out. So you should not try to handle that fire on your own. The best and the safest thing you can do is call the fire department. Have the fire department come out and deal with it. Quite frankly, you should have a site assessment done before. So if you’re putting in a dust collector, call your fire department and let them know you’re putting one in. Go over the plans with them. Explain to them what you’re doing, what the dust type is, what the sprinkler system looks like in the collector. Then come up with a protocol because you’ll never be prepared for it.
I’ll share a funny story with you. This is going back eight, nine years. I walked out into the plant and we had a couple guys up on a man lift, a scissor lift welding on there. The sparks had gotten down, and when they did there were some rags laying on the bottom of the man lift. So all I saw was a fire on the bottom of the man lift and I saw two guys up on the man lift. I was like, “Hey!” So, they saw the fire and they pointed to the fire extinguisher and I grabbed it. You would think – I consider myself fairly intelligent. I can kind of take care of myself.
Donovan: You’ve had a good amount of life experience.
Jeremiah: I’ve had a decent life experience. I couldn’t figure out how to get that fire extinguisher to work for the life of me. I just was in a panic mode. I wasn’t prepared for it. So it’s like a dust collector is the same way only a lot more severe.
Donovan: And complicated.
Jeremiah: And complicated. You open the door and now you’re introducing oxygen. Now you’re standing there. These people have families they have to go home to at night. So you want to make sure that they’re taken care of.
Donovan: Normally the door is up high. You might be on a ladder.
Jeremiah: They’re trapped on a catwalk. You don’t want to do that. You get with your AHJ, or authority having jurisdiction, and your fire department. Just run through everything with them. It’s better for us too because it’s less likely that the thing is going to burn so bad to where it warps or damages things. When we get there Russ can literally put new gaskets on and put some filters in and its fixed and everybody is safe.
Donovan: Save everybody money. Save everybody downtime. Save everybody’s life is what we’re looking for.
Jeremiah: Or you can take it a step further and before you put the dust collector in make sure you partner with a good company, whether its us or somebody else, that knows about combustible dust and fire hazards because you can put a lot of devices in. You can put CO2 systems in. You can put wet systems in. You can put dry systems in. Theres a lot of things you can do. So just make sure, I’d just tell the listeners or the viewers, to make sure you’re paired with the right company when you’re putting a dust collector in. I got off track. I just wanted to circle back to that.
Donovan: No, there’s no off track here. One of the ways you guys have developed to prevent fires was our Spark Trap. We’ve seen that effective in a lot – not just our collector, but a lot of collectors. It’s really great. It’s a good piece of equipment. If you’re listening now and you’ve had a fire or on your plasma table or on your laser table that’s a real simple, low cost, easy to install piece that can help prevent that.
Jeremiah: Grinding, blasting, torch, plasma, laser, anything with metal…
Russ: Yeah, basically any of these processes that can create a fine dust that could have a spark in the process.
Jeremiah: It has to have some mass to it too, and that’s the key. We get a lot of calls. We got a call from Disney World. They wanted to put one on their outdoor smoker. It was a big smoker. It was like an eight inch diameter…we said that if it doesn’t have some mass to it like metal dust, it’s an impingement type tortuous device is essentially what it is. That ember has a shield of fire around it. It has to actually hit something and knock itself out. Think about if you ever get grinding dust or if you’re welding and you get a bary, you know, and it gets on you. That’s a pretty heavy, molten piece of steel. It has enough mass to knock itself out. If you’re doing buffing for firearms, let’s say, and you have cotton and a rouge, burning embers of cotton. It won’t put that out. We’ve seen that before. People have misapplied them.
Donovan: Just call us. We’ll figure it out.
Jeremiah: We can do it.
Donovan: And if that’s not the solution we have other ones. I feel like we did a pretty good job on fire there.
Jeremiah: I think we did.
Donovan: Let’s move on. Let’s think here. Do you ever show up to a collector and it is just packed full of material? Do you ever have that experience Russ?
Jeremiah: Not our collectors. No.
Russ: I have seen a few out there. People don’t inspect their hopper that they’re filling, the drum underneath, or a screw conveyor plugs up or something like that. It just completely fills them to the top of the filters.
Donovan: You get that call. “Hey Russ. The collectors not…” and you open the door and its like someone stacked their locker, huh? Everything comes piling out.
Jeremiah: I have a funny story about that. I know Russ probably has a couple. When you’re either the salesman or the service guy and you pull up to a customer that you haven’t seen in a while or you’re just coming to say ‘hi’ the last thing you want to see is the customer at that dust collector trying to shovel it out, right? Because you know what that means? You’re getting dirty. You’re getting dirty. You’re going to spend the rest of the day helping them clean out that collector. Sometimes its not necessarily the design or the application. It’s just maybe an upset condition. There are things that can happen. I pulled up to one. It was a grain project. I pulled up to the collector. We had like eight or nine collectors on this job. I go up and there’s a guy going up with a skid steer to the dust collector, to the bottom of a baghouse, a BRF. So I’m kind of getting my hard hat out, kind of doing some stuff. All of a sudden I look back up and there’s no skid steer there anymore. Theres no guy. Theres no skid steer. He had opened the hatch on the grain bin and it completely just covered him. I know that’s kind of not funny in the industry because I know there’s been in grain silos some deaths and accidents. This one was on the ground and it could have been bad but it was just semi-funny because the guy was kind of completely covered with grain. I thought, “Oh, this is going to be a long day helping him get out.” It happens in our business, doesn’t it?
Russ: I remember when that one happened too.
Donovan: Russ, what about you? Do you have any experiences like that? Have you ever shown up to a collector and you’re like, “This is just…”
Russ: I had a plastic application where I showed up and they were having some issues with bridging over the airlock and it just completely filled the collector. Usually its lack of inspections and lack of checking the discharge device.
Donovan: Okay, so if we have somebody out there listening and they’re like, “Man, that happens to us all the time.” What are the things you could start to look for or notice. You’re saying an airlock. An airlock can bridge over. What would cause that? What would cause an airlock to bridge over?
Russ: One of the scenarios could be overfilling the discharge hopper underneath it and it allows it to back up through there. The simplest thing is just to check the discharge hopper more frequently. Other things could be a large object bridged across and settled on it. Run the collector without the airlocks running for an extended period of time and then turn them on. Did the dust form a cake above it? Those are some of the more common scenarios that we’ve run across.
Donovan: I can remember a couple pictures of this I’ve seen where you have the three sides of the hopper and they look all real nice and shiny and the other one looks like a steel drum from someone banging on it because it’s been bridging and that’s the only way.
Jeremiah: Yeah, you don’t want to see that.
Donovan: That’s not the correct service plan.
Jeremiah: They need some help. You don’t want to see that when that’s your collector and you installed that. You don’t mind seeing that when you’re going on a sales call and they need to get a new collector. One thing to talk about with that is that there are people that have plug ups. One of the things that we see a lot and Russ and I have dealt with this numerous times is that you get it all cleaned out. You put the cover back on. You turn the airlock on. You get the fan running. They think they’re fine. Three hours later they call back and they’re plugged up again. “I just don’t understand it. What was it? I even found, in this case, I found a two by four that was covering the airlock or something. It doesn’t make sense”
Well what it is, is if you get a really bad plug and you’re up in between the filters. You’re just jammed up. It’s really, really important to go in there and either take the cartridges out or to take the bags out and literally take a stick and inspect down in there and make sure that all that’s cleared out. It’s a big job because the easier thing to do would be to just turn it back on and go, but you can cause yourself a lot of grief by not cleaning that out because if you get a football sized plug come down now you’re plugged again.
Russ: It starts the chain reaction over again.
Jeremiah: I don’t know how many times we’ve gotten that call and they say, “We even found the board that plugged it. What caused it the second time?”
“Well, did you clean it out good?”
“Yeah, we cleaned it out pretty good.”
“No, I mean did you clean it out really good?” That little ball of dust can be hanging up in there and cause a lot of problems.
Donovan: I know we’ve talked about this a lot here how our style of collector is a vertical style collector and we have a large door that makes it easy to access and to check all that. There are other collectors out there that could be having that problem because they have a horizontal style collector. That just allows more bridging in between those filters.
Jeremiah: That’s interesting. I talked to one of our reps. He’s been with us several years now. He came from a leading competitor that makes a horizontal style cartridge. When we went and looked at our unit we opened the door up and you could see right down in the hopper. You know, you’ve got this big opening, about the size of this table, and you can look right down into the hopper. He said, “That is just amazing.”
I said, “What do you mean? I’m used to seeing this. What are you talking about?”
He said, “You can actually access the hopper if you need to.”
I still didn’t get it. “What do you mean?”
He said, “Well, the other ones were all these little holes that were all about this size. Theres no way to get down into that hopper to clean that out if it ever does bridge. I never dealt with that before so I never really noticed it. You’re absolutely right. Having that access is huge.
Donovan: At this table I am for sure the rookie, so this is a lot of stuff I’ve learned. I’ve learned a lot from you and from Russ.
Jeremiah: You’re not a rookie anymore. You’re getting there. We’ve got to get him cleaning out a couple dust collectors. Or maybe you have?
Donovan: I’ve been on a couple with Russ.
Russ: We did take him on a filter change project on a collector right after it caught on fire.
Jeremiah: I’m still hearing about that. I still hear grumbling about that. I forgot.
Russ: That was a long day. That was a rough day.
Donovan: It was a learning experience. We’ll leave it at that.
Russ: It was not our style of collector. The filers were ovals, bags.
Donovan: And that was a fire.
Russ: It was from the aftermath of a fire.
Donovan: That makes it tough.
Jeremiah: Good learning experience.
Donovan: It burned the bags off. They fell down into the collector. It was a complicated process, but we were there to support the customer and help them get it done. Like you said, I’m not normally doing that. When we need service done we’re all on board here at Imperial.
Jeremiah: You’re so good at what you do now with your podcast that we would never do that to you again.
Donovan: I’d be glad. I’d be glad to go with Russ and do the service. So, Russ, we talked about some of the issues that could happen, what happens with this bridging…material style, does that often lend to bridging? Different material styles?
Russ: Some materials are more prone to bridging. When you get into the longer, stringier type materials that cling together the material just naturally wants to cling to itself. Any kind of moisture presence can enhance that. Those types of materials you will see are more apt to bridge than some of the fine, loose dust. Anything that wants to clump is going to have the tendency to want to bridge.
Donovan: Maybe that’s another area people aren’t thinking to look for. If you’re getting moisture into your system somehow that’s causing you to bridge too, huh?
Russ: Yes, it can.
Donovan: That’s just a simple issue. Now, I don’t know if I’m describing this right but you were so tired of having to deal with this issue over and over again that you were kind of the spearhead of coming up with this Dust Level Sensor we have now, right?
Russ: Yeah with our drum kits, we kept coming across pretty frequently that people would fail to check the drums and empty the in a timely manner it can create backups into the collector. So we sat back and looked at some options and I kind of spearheaded it. We decided to do a drum dust level sensor. It’s a sensor that ultrasonically measures dust in the barrel. It can be used in any collector and any container where you can shoot down from the top.
Donovan: Yeah, you just drill a hole in and it sends a sound wave down. Am I describing this well?
Russ: Yes, it sounds a sound wave. Whenever it bounces off the material within the specified range of the sensor it triggers the fault and sends an alert. We have outputs where we can just turn on a static light, turn on a horn or something, or shut the collector down depending on what level you want to go with that.
Donovan: Now I know there’s other styles of monitoring devices out there. One’s got a wire that kind of goes down in and can hang off the lid. One is a paddle. I know I’ve talked to customers that they have the wire one and they’re not being real careful when they’re removing that and they’re snapping it right off.
Russ: You have that, and the paddle wheel is very hard to get the lid off the drum whenever its attached with pretty rigid flex hose. All those other types of sensors seem to be pretty cumbersome and hard to work with. We wanted to go with something that was very small. It doesn’t create another hassle.
Donovan: That sensor is only sticking like a quarter inch out the other side of the barrel.
Russ: On the inside of the drum, yeah.
Jeremiah: It’s like the size of a magic marker, or half of that. It’s about the weight of a magic marker too.
Donovan: And most of it’s at the top, not down into the barrel. It’s pretty sturdy too.
Russ: Yeah, it’s a heavy duty sensor.
Donovan: So, like I said, Russ is one of our R&D guys. He is out there seeing what the problems are and going, “There has to be a way we can make this better. There has to be a way we can try to solve this problem so I don’t have to get on an airplane from Pennsylvania to California to let somebody know that they have a two by four stuck in their hopper.” Right? Or just that they’re letting their barrel fill up too much. We’re glad to do that, if that’s what needed.
Jeremiah: Yeah.
Donovan: Now, I’m going to circle back around to this. I’ve listened to both of you and the one thing I hear over and over and over again is the number one thing you can do to service your collector is take care of it before you need the service. Preventative maintenance seems to be one of the big things that can probably help solve a lot of issues. Right?
Russ: Yes, it can.
Donovan: So I want to hear Russ’s top three things that people can do for preventative maintenance on their collector. These are the three things, if you’re not going to do anything else, do these three things to help make sure you’re collector is running good, regularly. What could be the three biggest things?
Russ: Well, monitor your differential pressure regularly. Knowing the history of your differential pressure tells you the condition of filters it gives you a trend to follow. So if you have a sudden change, say you’ve been running at one inch of water column and then the next day you’re running at ten. Okay, there is something, some kind of upset condition that happened, and that can help up pin point that kind of thing.
Donovan: Before we get too deep into this, in case anybody doesn’t know, what is differential pressure?
Russ: Differential pressure is a measurement of resistance of airflow across the filters. So we take the pressure before the filters and after the filters and that difference in pressure is the amount of resistance the filters are applying to the airstream.
Donovan: So how much is in the dirty side of the collector and how much is in the clean side of the collector? The pressure difference, right? Am I explaining that well?
Russ: Yeah. The difference between those two pressures is differential pressure. It’s a resistance across the filters, whatever those filters are imposing as a resistance. So that’s monitoring that and being aware is one big thing. Maintaining your pulse valves; I have literally opened up a pulse valve, a diaphragm valve and seen springs broken inside the valve. So the manufacturers do have maintenance intervals recommended. Typically on our collectors we recommend every two years rebuilding.
Donovan: So you’re saying if the springs broken, it’s probably not cleaning your filters, right?
Russ: Yeah, it’s not as effectively cleaning them.
Jeremiah: Well it’s a ten cent spring, and hundreds of dollars for the filters. Change them.
Donovan: Not only that, but your filters get clogged. Your differential pressure goes up. A ten cent spring could cause your whole system to go down. You could have guys you’re paying $20 an hour to sitting around over a ten cent spring. So, sorry keep going. I didn’t mean to interrupt you.
Russ: Compressed air pressure. Have the correct pressure for your collector. Usually I’ve seen that if you run too light of a compressed air pressure you can not effectively clean the filters. If you go too high on your compressed air pressure, you can damage a filter. Put a hole in it. So it’s very important to get clean, dry compressed air.
Donovan: I know for our machine we have a recommended one. Is that pretty universal across all machines or can that vary from machine to machine.
Russ: Some manufacturers have some slight variances from what we recommend. They’re all pretty close.
Donovan: So what would be that optimal number for your pressure? If you had to say that you want to be within this range…
Russ: Between eighty and ninety PSI.
Donovan: Eighty and ninety PSI. That’s heading to your tank and that’s where it should be. Well, and I know I’ve heard you say this a bunch of times too, because I’ve sat in on calls. You have to make sure that air is dry, right?
Russ: Yes.
Donovan: That can cause some issues too.
Russ: If you have moisture in your compressed air, that air is being blown directly on the filters, so water, or any kind of moisture – oil – in that compressed air will go directly on the filters and that can cause all kinds of filter problems.
Donovan: Which will make your differential pressure go up.
Russ: Yeah.
Donovan: Your point number one is really a key indicator. If you’re going to do anything on your machine it sounds like you should really be checking that everyday.
Jeremiah: Log your data. They make data loggers too that you can buy. How much are they? They’re pretty inexpensive.
Russ: Some of the real basic ones are probably about eighty dollars. Then you’ve got more advanced systems you can get. You can get up pretty crazy on some of them.
Jeremiah: Honestly sometimes OSHA requires it. DEP might require it. In your particular cause you have to check and see if you have to do it.
Donovan: I’ve seen the two dollar version of a pad and a #2 pencil.
Jeremiah: That works too. You can do it that way.
Russ: Put a clipboard right on the control panel and just write it down.
Jeremiah: The other thing that wasn’t mentioned, because you covered so much but the one thing I was thinking of is its important to keep your hopper clean from dust. So we were talking about the level indicator before. That’s important because if that dust starts to fill up in that hopper and you’re constantly running a full hopper you’re going to re-entrain that dust back on your filters and drastically shorten your filer life. You want to make sure that that’s empty. A lot of people, their indicator for knowing when it’s time to change the drum is when the dust collector starts to spike and their ∆P or their pressure drop. So that’s not a good thing. It’s a lot easier if you just clean it out, depending on what size. Some people have a twenty gallon drum. Some people have fifty-five, or their might be semi-trucks we’ve done where you’re loading out.
Russ: Self-dumping hoppers or something.
Jeremiah: Yeah, just make sure that there’s a regular PM on it and that it’s cleaned out regularly.
Donovan: I was just talking to someone the other day about their plasma machine. They’re running two ten hour shifts on it. So, that’s what’s happening to them. They keep getting back up. I don’t know if you’ve ever dealt with plasma dust but if it gets on the floor its just a mess.
Jeremiah: It’s like liquid.
Donovan: It is. So, it is not a fun one to clean up if you have to do that anytime.
Jeremiah: It stains your hands. It kind of gets in your skin.
Russ: It’s a mess.
Jeremiah: We’ve both been around that a lot.
Donovan: No one wants to be pulling that drum out and and just watch it go all over the floor. That’s not ideal. Well, Russ thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. You have a wealth of knowledge. Jeremiah, thanks for being on too and being our first multi-person podcast.
Jeremiah: Our podcast is growing numerically.
Donovan: It’s growing. We really appreciate that. Russ, are there any other tips out there that you would like to leave anybody with, other than monitor your differential pressure? I’ve learned that one.
Russ: When you’re setting up a collector it’s important for filter life to get the airflow right because that wills set the stage for the lifespan of your filters.
Donovan: Great point. These aren’t just machines that you turn on and they’re ready to go. You’ve got to tune them in a little bit.
Jeremiah: I want to plug something though.
Donovan: Go for it.
Jeremiah: I mean, we have a service that does this, right? So what is this service? Tell us about this service.
Donovan: Russ is the head of our ServiceMAXX team. Just like everything else here it’s the “MAXX”. They can do startups. They can do service calls, troubleshoot. Russ is normally really good about being available on the phone. Any more these days a lot of people need a full report on what they have in their facility for either their insurance companies or their jurisdictions that they need to have that. We make very nice reports for that. We have a wealth of knowledge and ability. If you’re interested in that or have an issue and need something, call in. Theres a lot of people here. We’ll get you in touch. We’ll get you on the schedule. That’s us here. It’s not just for Imperial collectors. We can help.
Russ: We’ll service any collector out there.
Donovan: We just want to help you out. We just want to make sure you have a clean, safe environment for your workers. We want everybody to go home healthy at the end of the day.
Jeremiah: Absolutely.
Donovan: That’s what we’re trying to do here. If you’ve learned something today or you’ve enjoyed this podcast. I hope you like us and subscribe. We’re on all the podcast channels. You can find us on Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn. We’re on everything, all social media. I just want to say one more time thanks Jeremiah for coming on. Thanks Russ for coming on. Everybody who’s out there listening stay healthy, stay safe, and we’ll see you next time.
Jeremiah: Thank you Donovan.
Russ: Thanks.
Jeremiah: Thanks Russ.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Dusty Jobs Podcast. Breathe better, work safer.
It is a new year and a new season, and we also got a new studio. Donovan got a minute to talk with Chalmer Ritzert our VP here at Imperial Systems. Chalmer talks about his tier 1 auto manufacturing background and how that helped build the future for a more efficient and better company. He also touches on all of the new things going on in the shop, and how we are always continuing to get better.
Narrator: Welcome to the Dusty Jobs Podcast from Imperial Systems, industry knowledge to make your job easier and safer.
Donovan: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Dusty Jobs Podcast. We’re in our new studio today filming our second season, episode one of the Dusty Jobs Podcast. We’re glad that you guys could all make it back. If you like how this looks and you think we’re doing a good job here we’d be glad to show you our entire facility. We do virtual tours and virtual demos now. If you like that, you can log on to our website and let us know. We’d be glad to give you a full tour. Today as a guest we have our Vice President, Chalmer Ritzert. How are you doing today Chalmer?
Chalmer: I’m good Donovan. How are you?
Donovan: I’m doing great. I’m doing great. Thanks for taking a moment out of your busy schedule to come and tell us a little about yourself and your history. We’re going to talk a little bit about how Imperial is growing and changing and some things we have going on here.
Chalmer: Absolutely.
Donovan: Yeah, so that’s exciting stuff. Now, if I remember this correctly, you haven’t always been in dust collection your entire career, right? Your career started somewhere else, right?
Chalmer: No, I have not been in dust collection my entire life. I’ve been in manufacturing over twenty five years now. I actually started in the automotive industry.
Donovan: Now, that was straight out of college?
Chalmer: That was straight out of college. I did my internship, and then I worked for a company in the automotive industry, a tier one automotive manufacturer. We made parts for General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, numerous companies. Our main customers was General Motors. We were actually an injection molding company. We made interior and exterior doors, dashboards, those kinds of things, and then exterior bumpers and side fascias and boilers. You know, all the things you’d see on the outside of cars and we shipped them directly to the automotive manufacturers to put on the cars.
Donovan: Got you. So you guys were in a parts facility and had machines that shot injection into a mold and then it popped out a part? Is that right?
Chalmer: We had enormous injection molding machines. We would make hundreds of thousands of parts a week. If they were exterior we would paint them and assemble them, send them, really, all over the world, but send them to assembly plants where they would put the parts in, sequence them in place, and put the parts on the cars. We would do the same thing with door panels, with dashboards, with center bezels, and those kinds of things.
Donovan: Now, you weren’t working the paint line there or –
Chalmer: No.
Donovan: What was your role?
Chalmer: So when I first started out of college – my degree is actually in environmental health and safety. So, I was first hired as environmental health and safety and there was about seven hundred employees in one facility and we had another seven hundred in another facility and I was responsible to do environmental health and safety. In a painting operation, environmental is a huge piece. Safety is another huge piece. So I kind of cut my teeth as a twenty-two year old kid doing that kind of stuff. I did all the permitting. I did all the reporting. I did all the inspections. I did everything for that. That was kind of what I went to college for. Somewhere along the line I got the opportunity to fill in for the manufacturing manager of the company. He had left and they said, “Hey, will you fill in for this guy?” I was into everything.
“Will you fill in for this guy while we try to fill the position?”
I said, “Sure, I would love to fill in for him. The only thing I ask is that you give me an opportunity at the position as well. Thats kind of where everything started. I slowly started to move out of the environmental health and safety. I still maintained all those responsibilities, but I moved into manufacturing manager where I had about four hundred employees at that time and I was responsible for all the injection molding in the company. Three shifts, seven days a week. Just a very high stress, high volume, high quality – you know, I got all my experience in terms of lean manufacturing, in terms of high pressure, in terms of making sure that parts were on time and parts were perfect and those kinds of things early on in my career. I used to have this full head of hair, and then I got into automotive.
Donovan: Didn’t we all?
Chalmer: Now look at me. That is a direct result of being in the automotive industry. Anybody who’s in the automotive industry will tell you that it is one of the most high stress, high volume. It can just be crazy at times.
Donovan: That’s so interesting that from that environmental position into that management position, and I’m sure when you were in that environmental position it just gave you an opportunity to see how everything was working. That just lent itself to probably having a better understanding.
Chalmer: So, for me, first of all I had some people in my life in the company that were great mentors. Second of all, being the environmental health and safety person you’re kind of involved in everything. You’re involved in the day-to-day, doing this and moving people around. You have to be, from a job rotation and ergonomic standpoint, making sure people are fitted for the job and work stations are right. You get into engineering. You get into machine design. You get into all those kinds of things. So I’m involved in the day to day operations and I’m kind of around it all the time. I’m kind of involved. I’m kind of having conversations. I’m doing those kinds of things and the guy that was the manufacturing manager, he literally just left one day. They were kind of high and dry. So they’ve got a three shift operation, four hundred people with no manager, but what was really interesting was the very next day they put me in charge and the very next day they were going to the people in the department saying that I was the safety manager yesterday. Today I’m in charge. Oh, and I’m twenty three.
Donovan: How long were you in that role? Did you stay with that company for a while? Did you move on to another company?
Chalmer: I did. I stayed with that company for eleven years doing that same thing, and that company, unfortunately, closed, which was a sad day. It closed in the mid 2000s. I went from there to a different type of automotive company where they made shipping containers for automotive parts for the tier one suppliers. So when you would make the parts at the tier one supplier they would buy a reusable metal rack and those racks had to be specially designed for all those parts to go back and forth.
Donovan: So that’s a little more heavy fab?
Chalmer: It’s very heavy fab. So I went from injection molding to metal work. To welding, to that kind of thing, and I was with that company for a while. It was, unfortunately – I laugh, but it also closed. None of this is my fault, but I like to say that I learned a lot of lessons along the way because of the failures of the companies that I was with. You know what I mean? Manufacturing is manufacturing, but you start to learn different processes. From a manufacturing standpoint I was really good at the automotive kind of thing. I could play the game and I could make things happen. I was solid in the environmental portion of things. Who would have guessed that I would ever end up in dust collection?
Donovan: Well, yeah. How in the world did you go from…
Chalmer: Well, it gets even better, because I leave the automotive industry and I actually got involved in the largest company in the world that made promotional products. We made and decorated promotional products. It’s the largest company in the world that does it.
Donovan: When you say promotional product, I’m not even sure I know what that means.
Chalmer: Water bottles, pens, MP3 players…anything that has a logo on it from a company we made.
Donovan: So you’re saying that if I go to a trade show and I’m filling my bag up with stuff, all the stuff is what you guys made?
Chalmer: It’s got to come from somewhere. There was a boom in manufacturing and in the economy in 2006 and 2007, around there, and this company had grown and then they had bought a new facility, and it was just an empty building. They hired me as the plant manager to take over and build that facility up, and I did that. We got up to about three hundred employees in about a 400,000 square foot manufacturing facility. It was pretty neat. It was a real good opportunity for me. In 2009, the economy dropped and the place closed.
Donovan: We all know what happened in 2008.
Chalmer: So, the company that Chalmer was at closed down. As they were starting to announce that the place was going to close there was an ad in the local newspaper that said “Operations Manager Needed.” I called the number. It was just a little short note. I called the number and the rest is history. Here I am.
Donovan: You got Jeremiah on the other line.
Chalmer: I actually didn’t get Jeremiah. I got the lady who was the accountant at the time. She said, “He’d like to meet with you. Come in and bring your resume.” That kind of stuff. We met a couple of times. It was weird for me because I had been a high volume automotive, you know, doing those kind of things. Lots of employees, hundreds of employees. Managing all the workings and that kind of stuff. I show up for my interview and its a small place. They’ve got, like, eighteen employees at the most. It was just a different vibe altogether. I pulled into the parking lot for that first interview and I’m thinking, “Maybe this isn’t my fit.” Something pulled me inside and I went in and I met with Jeremiah and he and I hit it off. We have a good relationship and we’ve had a good relationship since day one. I was like, “You know what, I’m going to give it a shot.” I’ll be honest with you, it was the best decision I ever made in my life.
Donovan: As a person who works here, we’re glad to have you. We’re glad you chose to come here. You’re a great go-to person for a lot of things.
Chalmer: I appreciate that.
Donovan: And if anybody is out there listening, this is not the announcement of the shut down of Imperial Systems. We are still going strong.
Chalmer: So I would like to reiterate all of the good lessons that I learned by being involved in those. Because I know now not to do those kinds of things, and I know the kinds of things that will make us successful.
Donovan: I’ll speak to this. The success we’ve had in the last year and the way we’ve been able to pull through it as a company, the year 2020. Where that could have went and where we are actually at is incredible. I think that is largely due to you and Jeremiah and everybody here pulling through and using a lot of wisdom in what we have, and knowledge, and experience. In my opinion, I think we came through 2020 stronger than we went into it.
Chalmer: Absolutely. You can say about the pandemic and you can say about the issues that it caused but I believe that issues like those will only make you stronger. I believe we make good decisions. We made some poor ones. I wouldn’t say that we’re perfect, but we made some good decisions. We managed things well. To be honest with you its easy to make good decisions when you have a backing of really good people. I would say that’s the blessing of Imperial Systems for me. It’s the people that work here.
Donovan: Thanks. I know we all appreciate hearing you say that. I think the other thing that really helped lean towards our success during this year is that our whole model, our whole idea, our whole process here is being a lean manufacturer and not having a lot of waste, and not having a lot of overhead because we’ve taken this lean model. I know that’s something you champion a lot and that’s a lot coming from you and your history in automotive. Can you speak to that and our philosophy on that here?
Chalmer: So, automotive is very high on the lean manufacturing principles. It could be Six Sigma. It could be 5S.
Donovan: Let me pause you for one second, because maybe we’ve got somebody out there listening who doesn’t understand what lean manufacturing is. So we might have to define that for them. Could you give us a quick definition on what lean is?
Chalmer: For me, the best way to describe lean is “how you can do your job easier”. For me that is the most simple, broke down way to explain how we can make the job easier for people. If you’re looking at lean, at the ultimate end of the day, how can you make it easier for that person and eliminate waste, time, or whatever.
Donovan: Taking less steps. Using less material.
Chalmer: Sure. To be honest with you, it’s a lot of common sense is what it is.
Donovan: I think the other thing you say that we talk about – we have a Wednesday morning meeting and one of the things I’ve heard Jeremiah say and you say is, “If there’s something that annoys you, let us know because we will try to fix it.”
Chalmer: Absolutely. Fix what bugs you.
Donovan: Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you there. Keep going. How has that impacted our company, our culture, our community here?
Chalmer: So, when I was involved in those lean manufacturing projects – huge manufacturing projects – and I saw success. Where I saw success was where it was broken down individually and kept as simple as possible. Then I would see that grow. I would say about five to six years ago we were made aware of a local presentation on a process called 2 second lean. I had been skeptical. To a certain extent I can be skeptical about a lot of things. I had been traditionally trained in the Six Sigma, 5S, and those types of processes. I went to this conference and they were talking about this 2 second lean. It is such a simple process. It is so simple. It literally is ‘fix what bugs you’. Jeremiah and I both fell in love with it right from the get go. Its really hard to institute a huge, sweeping thing, but 2 Second Lean is so simple that people just kind of buy into it and go with it. For us, we identify waste. We empower people to identify waste, to look for waste, but the key to it for us is that I don’t want you to come to me and say, “I’ve got a solution. What do you think about doing this?” I want you to come to me and say, “Look what I did, and I made my day better, and I fixed this,” or, “I did this,” or, “I moved this, and I made my day better.” We’re trying to empower people to have the authority to change their own day, to fix things on their own. It’s been hugely successful. They don’t need that kind of permission to move…
Donovan: That garbage can two feet closer.
Chalmer: Yeah, sure. I mean it’s that little stuff that makes such a huge difference in people’s day. When you add that all up at the end of the year the process is so much better. The product is so much better. People are so much happier.
Donovan: It’s great. If you do a virtual demo with us, and you do a virtual tour with us you can go through and you can see all our carts and how everything is labeled and there are shadow spots where all the tools go. It just helps the guys in the shop to stay organized and allow them to not be wondering where things went and not having to pull all your tools from here to there. Everything’s on a cart on wheels. It’s really neat to see all that.
Chalmer: You just put a little effort behind that stuff. A lot of that stuff is not very expensive to put into place. A lot of that is Harold in assembly doesn’t want to walk twenty feet every five minutes to pick up a different tool. Well put all Harold’s tools right there where he’s working.
Donovan: Let him load the cart up with all the bolts he needs and wheels the whole thing over.
Chalmer: It’s common sense, but if you don’t do it, if you don’t put some effort behind it, you’re going to waste all that time.
Donovan: And I think the other thing that I’ve noticed since I’ve been here is that not only are we willing to do the little things to make our process more lean and efficient and possibly one of the most up to date fab shops in our area, I couldn’t tell you how far, but I know we’ve been making some moves to…I mean, you could talk more about that. You’ve been pretty essential in making all that happen.
Chalmer: Sure. Again, we learn by failing. When you first start out in a business and you’re growing a business, you use what’s available to you to get the job done, and you use what you can afford. As you grow you start to look at different options. We make investments in equipment and processes that make people’s lives easier and that make our product better. What we find is that inevitably every one of those things pay for themselves very quickly. For example, in the olden days, in the first iterations of the CMAXX, those were all wet painted. It was a brutal process to wet paint these things. It wasn’t environmentally friendly. It just wasn’t. So we invested in one of the largest batch powder coating operations around.
Donovan: When you’re saying large, you could fit…
Chalmer: I could park two of my trucks in our bake oven easily. We make big stuff. We make big stuff. You make big stuff, you’ve got to paint big stuff. We invested, and we did a lot of research on how these various powder coating operations worked and what kind of material handling system we wanted to use and what kind of guns and what kind of powder. There was a lot of research that went into it. We came down to this operation now where we can paint a fourteen or fifteen foot diameter baghouse and put it in our oven and bake it. There are no batch ovens around that could even come close to doing something like that.
Donovan: Not only did that make our product stronger, it lasts longer. It’s healthier. It’s more environmental, but it also made it faster.
Chalmer: We went from in an eight hour shift maybe painting two rounds with wet paint to painting twelve to sixteen rounds with powder coat, made the quality better, made the product better. In addition, we have zero environmental footprint here. There’s no exhaust from the paint. The wash that we use is environmentally safe. It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s evaporated off.
Donovan: It’s great for all those guys working on the paint line. It’s healthier for them.
Chalmer: And for the community. Theres nothing going into the water here. Theres nothing going into the air here. We’re very conscious of our environmental footprint.
Donovan: And it cuts our lead times down for our customers. It lets us get our products out to our customers a lot faster. So we’ve done that. That’s our one thing. That’s one of many. You got anything else you want to touch on that we’ve done recently?
Chalmer: So, we invested in a new brake press to try and speed the process up. The newer brake presses are fast and they’re considerably more accurate. What happens is we are able to break parts quicker. We’re able to brake more parts, eliminating welding in a lot of cases, or shortening up the amount of welding that’s necessary. Our parts fit better together. We’re able to brake the parts that we do brake faster. What once was a huge bottleneck in our process is now one of our best manufacturing efficiencies out there. We have just recently gone down the road and started to invest in a laser. For years we’ve used plasma cutting. With plasma cutting you have high accuracy. It does a great job. I’m a huge fan of it. You can do big stuff on it. We needed to pick up some speed and a laser is faster. It has its limitations in terms of size and those kinds of things, but it certainly gives us the speed and the clean up afterwards. Theres no slag or anything on the steel. The cleanup afterwards is considerably better. So we’ve invested in one of the newest and greatest lasers for our facility. It will be installed here before too long.
Donovan: So if you have a cleaner cut and a better bend, that just takes less time for the guys to weld it. It’s less grinding.
Chalmer: Absolutely. You think about in a normal manufacturing process for sheet metal there’s a lot of grinding and buffing and cleaning up corners and knocking off slag and that kind of stuff. If you can eliminate those kinds prior to paint and stuffs coming out nice and clean we’re making a better product and we’re making it faster.
Donovan: And that’s healthier for the guys too.
Chalmer: It’s absolutely healthier for the guys.
Donovan: Now who was it? One of our welders, his name is slipping my mind. He does all our tubes.
Chalmer: Terry.
Donovan: Terry. Terry was telling me that he got to try a new welder out. Something happened with that. He had to go back to the old one. He felt like he was welding in sand or something. He was telling me it was so slow. What’s this new welder that Terry got?
Chalmer: Terry makes the header tanks for the CMAXXs. He’s the main guy for making the header tanks on the CMAXXs. It can be a tedious process. We had reached out to the welding supplier and they had brought us a demo unit of what’s called a pulse welder. Its just a different way to weld. Terry fell in love with it. It was faster. There was no BBs or slag coming off of the weld, the cleanup or anything like that. It was great. It was a demo. It was a very expensive demo. Terry kept stopping me. “Are we going to keep this? What are we going to do?” Finally we had to give the demo back. So Terry had to go back to his old welder. I remember the day I got to walk out there and tell him, “Hey Terry, your new welder will be here in a week or so,” and he got a new welder. In fact, the new welder worked so well that we’ve actually bought more of those welders for the facility. We’re using them in other areas. Less cleanup, faster, those types of things. There a little more expensive type welder, but they pay for themselves very quickly. So when you’re thinking about things that bug you, and thinking about things that go quicker, and do those kinds of things these are investments that Imperial makes to, even in the downtimes, to try to make our product better, and faster.
Donovan: It benefits our employees. It benefits our environment. It benefits our end users in the end. That’s why we can offer a lifetime warranty on our products because we are so assured of the quality of what’s going out that we feel confident in doing that.
Chalmer: This facility right now is operating at the highest its ever operated from a quality standpoint, from a speed standpoint, from an efficiency standpoint. It’s never operated like this.
Donovan: We’re excited for 2021 and continuing to be a lean company, continuing to make those improvements. Who knows? Maybe we’ll have to have you on again in two years and see where we’re at then.
Chalmer: We’re going to continue to invest. We’re going to continue to grow, and we’re going to continue to push forward and be the best. That’s the intention. If we are the best here, then we’re putting out the best product that you can buy.
Donovan: Well, Chalmer I just want to say thanks for coming on. I know you’re busy. You have a lot on your schedule. Thanks for taking a minute to catch everybody up on what’s going on in our company and how we’re continuing to improve and move forward. I just want to say that if you guys enjoyed this and there’s anyone out there listening we have some more backlog that you can listen to too. If you want to subscribe we’re putting these out every month. Like us on Facebook. We put this on every social media aspect out there. Like, subscribe, do that, and until we get a chance to talk to you again stay healthy, stay safe, and have a good day.
Chalmer: And again, thank you.
Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Dusty Jobs Podcast. Breathe better, work safer.
When you need to replace filters for your industrial dust collector, what kind of filters do you need? There are certainly many filter manufacturers offering lots of choices. However, most dust collector filter types come in a few common materials. So, the type of filter you need depends on your system and type of dust.
Overall, the industrial dust collector filter types listed below are some of the most common. But if you have a special challenge, or questions about your filter needs, our filter experts can help you. We’ve figured out filter problems for other customers so we can help you.
Choosing from Many Dust Collector Filter Types
Dust collector filters require replacement on a regular basis. Some people may get a year out of their filters, while some may get a few months. Because of the expense, people might look for the least expensive filters.
We’ll talk about what makes those cheap dust collector filters so cheap, and what other choices you have. The right type of filter will maximize dust collector performance.
Highest MERV rating for standard cartridge filters
Improved filter life
Captures more particles on the surface
FR filters treated with fire retardant
SPUNBOND
Different basic filter material
More resistant to damage
MERV rating lower than nanofiber
The choice for challenging dust or fumes
Can be tried if nanofiber doesn’t work
SPUNBOND HYDROPHOBIC/OLEOPHOBIC
Specialized material for certain applications
Resists damage from water or oil
For filters exposed to moisture or oily material
Specialized or challenging applications
Higher cost but sometimes necessary
SPUNBOND PTFE
PTFE repels most materials
Nonstick coating for sticky materials
For very challenging applications
Increased cost for special coating
Suitable for very tough applications
How to Choose the Right Type of Filter
Our filter experts know which filters have worked on applications like yours before. We can offer some advice on choosing the kind of cartridge filter you need. Still, every application has different challenges. Below you’ll find some suggestions for choosing the type of filter for your dust collection.
Your challenge: small dust or fume particles (down to 0.3 microns)
Possible solution: standard nanofiber filter
Your challenge: collecting flammable or explosive dust
Possible solution: nanofiber FR to resist fire
Your challenge: filtering dust that could damage filters
Possible solution: spunbond
Your challenge: oil, humidity, or water entering collector
Possible solution: spunbond hydrophobic/oleophobic
Your challenge: sticky problem materials most filters can’t handle
Possible solution: spunbond PTFE
These are possible solutions, not guarantees. All dust collection systems have their own challenges with their own materials. Some special applications require unusual filters not listed here. These types of cartridge filters will cover most dust collection needs.
The field of dust collection often presents you with difficulties that can cause problems for your business. The type of filter you use may contribute to the problem.
Contact us at Imperial Systems for help finding the right filter for your system. If you know what type of cartridge filter works for you, ask us about competitive pricing on replacements for all types of dust collectors, including Donaldson Torit, Camfil Farr, Robovent, Micro Air, and many others.
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