dehydrator

2 Articles

Scrapyard Vacuum Dehydrator Sucks The Water From Hydraulic Oil

February 16, 2025 by 23 Comments

Anyone who has ever had the misfortune of a blown head gasket knows that the old saying “oil and water don’t mix” is only partially true. When what’s coming out of the drain plug looks like a mocha latte, you know you’re about to have a very bad day.

[SpankRanch Garage] recently found himself in such a situation, and the result was this clever vacuum dehydrator, which he used to clean a huge amount of contaminated hydraulic fluid from some heavy equipment. The machine is made from a retired gas cylinder welded to a steel frame with the neck pointing down. He added a fill port to the bottom (now top) of the tank; as an aside, we had no idea the steel on those tanks was so thick. The side of the tank was drilled and threaded for things like pressure and temperature gauges as well as sight glasses to monitor the process and most importantly, a fitting for a vacuum pump. Some valves and a filter were added to the outlet, and a band heater was wrapped around the tank.

To process the contaminated oil, [Spank] glugged a bucket of forbidden milkshake into the chamber and pulled a vacuum. The low pressure lets the relatively gentle heat boil off the water without cooking the oil too badly. It took him a couple of hours to treat a 10-gallon batch, but the results were pretty stark. The treated oil looked far better than the starting material, and while it still may have some water in it, it’s probably just fine for excavator use now. The downside is that the vacuum pump oil gets contaminated with water vapor, but that’s far easier and cheaper to replace that a couple hundred gallons of hydraulic oil.

Never doubt the hacking abilities of farmers. Getting things done with what’s on hand is a big part of farm life, be it building a mower from scrap or tapping the power of the wind.

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Budget Dehydrator Gives Your Damp Filament A Second Chance

June 2, 2018 by 24 Comments

If you’ve had the misfortune of leaving your 3D printer filament out on a muggy day or, heaven forbid: showering with it, it’s probably soaked up quite a bit of moisture. Moisture will do more than just make your printer sound like Rice Crispies, it’ll ruin surface finishes and cause the filament to string into thin wisps between separate geometries on the same layer. Luckily for us, though, both [SafetyGlassesRequired] and [Joe Mike Terranella] give us the breakdown on taking a pair of snippers and about $40 in cash to start drying out our filament far away from the possibility of ruining any nearby kitchen ovens.

If you’ve been circling the 3D printer community for a while, you might have already heard about this trick. But with the arrival of a curiously-culinary-looking contraption called PrintDry, we can’t let the elephant in the room keep silent for much longer. Rather than risk our own pennies and leave ourselves stranded with a device that only makes the jerky on the box cover, [SafetlyGlassesRequired] and [Joe Mike Terranella] kindly prove our suspicions for us once and for all: a food dehydrator works perfectly for drying all that filament that we left out in the rain!

Clumsiness aside, a dehydrator isn’t a bad investment in the long run. Not only can we keep our supply dry, we might just be able to give all that freebie filament (that we dug out of the trash) a second life by resetting it to a clean, dry state.

These dehyrdators will toast all that moisture out of your filament, but it wont keep them dry whilst printing. For that problem, you’ll need to summon a heated drybox like this one.

[Joe Mike’s] solution will run us about $40. If you can do better, let us know in the comments.

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