Purchasing a used dust collector

If you are a fabrication shop owner, or painting shop manager, you might be considering purchasing a used dust collector to aid in the control of dust in your plant. Used dust collectors are often solld at machinery auctions and I have even seen them on ebay from time to time.

However, if you are going to purchase used you should be aware that all dust collectors are specifically sized to a customers application. The dust collector is sized based on the number of dust pick up points in the plant. Each pick up point will differ in the volume of dust that is expected to be collected. A balanced ducting system has to be created to make sure that all collection points will operate simulteaneously. The design of the ducting system leads to the ultimate inlet duct size and cfm rating for the dust collector.

Therefore if you purchase a used machine you would have to have an identical plant layout with identical dust pick up points to the plant from which your used collector came. In order to use your dust collector, you would have to have a ducting system created that provided a balanced system for all the dust collection requirements in your plant. The ultimate inlet size and cfm requirements would most likely end up being quite different from the specifications of your purchased collector.

It is possible to retrofit a used dust collector to work with your plants ducting system, but it would likely mean that you would have to have purchased a collector with at least a cfm rating close to what you need. Even then you still might have to change the fan and have new inlet diamters sized to make the system function.

Be extremely careful if you are considering purchasing a used dust collector. It could be in perfect working order but become non-functional in your particular application.

Dear Folks;

Does anyone out there have experiences with the failure of Mass Airflow Sensors in their Nissan cars. My Sentra's MAF sensor is giving me problems for the second time in three years. These sensors cost almost $2000 to purchase before installation. To look at them they are certainly not worth the money. The Mass Airflow Sensor looks like a short piece of 3" diamter plastic pipe with an airflow measuring device and some electronics built into the housing. Mechanics have told me these parts are prone to failure, usually just after the 60000 km warranty runs out.

I tried taking Nissan to court when the first one failed, but was unsuccessful, because I just did not have the resources to prove this part was an inferior design. I would love to find out if there are any less expensive aftermarket solutions for this part. I know that some "tuner" websites talk about these components but I have not noticed many people talking about how to fix this problem in their regular cars.

It's a shame because apart from this real annoyance, Nissan cars are really very well made and reliable. You would think they would at least want to try and solve this problem.