I built my own vac cart, but used an 8 hp horizontal shaft engine,
abut blower wheel orieintatin is pretty well not relavant. I used a
piece of 3/4" steel plate that I dressed both sides on to get it nice
and flat and reduce thickness........IIRC it came up to approx 1/2 or
a bit thicker.....I used 5/16" steel for the vanes, spaced equally at
90 deg apart (4 total of coarse). I milled slots for vanes to fit into
in the back plate, as well as the hub which was made of reg hot
rolled steel, bored and keyed for engine shaft. I used 4 vanes which
from previousl experiience proviced lots more suction than a fan with
more vanes did, but they are somewhat more noisey. I made the
housing out of 14 and 11 gau sheet steel stock. Inlet is 8" and
exhuast is 7" discharge.....It has more suction than my factory made
vac cart, and I can clean up debri and junk just as easy and good
without having a need to have the mower deck operating as the factory
made cart does with deck in operation, so it opened up more avenues of
use for on my Ford 1720, for general cleanup.......

I mig'd it all together, and checked balance, and adjusted
accordingly. It has sucked up and digested rocks, pieces of bricks
pine conesm pieces of tree limbs up to about 1" in diam........and has
yet to bend a vane. Its just about indestructable. The original one
had a cast aluminum fan assembly and thin gauge housing, and I
basically followed original dimensions but made it all much heavier
duty overall, but went with 4 instead of 6 vanes.

On Mon, 29 May 2006 16:17:05 GMT, RoyJ wrote:
Blower wheel really needs to have steel vanes (Think 1/4" plate) to
handle the occasinal twig or small rock without damage.


Where are you? I have a complete blower/engine combo. 3hp BS engine, 5"
(??) inlet. No reasonable offer refused!


Mickey Feldman wrote:

Anyone here built a grass clippings collector for their garden
tractor? Something that would fit on the 3-point hitch and probably be
driven by an old lawnmower motor (vertical shaft) since they're a dime
a dozen.

I'm wondering about the blower part in particular. My first thought is
that something like the impellor used in a shop dust collector would
work well, but perhaps experience says other wise?

Any shared experience or speculation welcomed.

Thanks,

Mickey