delaval Rotary vane pumps

[Rossell's Sugar Camp]

My neighbor is going to sell me his 3 rotary vane vacuum pumps for 100$ a piece. I have not seen them yet but what should i look at when I go look at them. I am not familiar with Rotary vane pumps but i know that 100$ is a heck of a deal nomatter what.

I have read about reclaimers and drips per minute? What is that? and I want to run them at as high a vacuum as possible. What can they acheive?

[Dale Mahalko]

Speaking in general terms, rotary pumps require an external oil supply to keep it from killing itself due to friction. There are 3-4 oiling ports, for the bearings and the vane chamber. The oiling bottles must be checked and refilled regularly.

Some oilers are able to use the vacuum itself to suck oil into the pump, so the oil can be in a big bottle shared across all oilers. There is less maintenance this way..

The oil feed rate on some pumps can be set using a needle valve and a sight-glass so you can see the oil dripping out of the feed supply spigot and into the pump oil-feed holes.

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A oil reclaimer is a device to collect oil that is thrown out of the vacuum air exhaust, carried as a fine mist in the exhaust. If you don't have a reclaimer, then over time you get a huge nasty dark blue tar patch just below the vacuum air exhaust. This is not great for the nearby environment, since it leaches into the ground and may contaminate groundwater. Oh well, at least I never needed to mow the lawn in that spot next to the barn...

An oil reclaimer can be a very simple device, otherwise known as a "muffler", which usually contains perforated pipes and a large air chamber where the exhaust air slows down and the oil clings to the interior metal surfaces.

You might be able to make a reclaimer yourself, by getting a huge diesel tractor muffler and drilling a drain hole in the bottom to collect the oil in a bucket. (If the muffler isn't liquid tight, oil will also seep out of every seam migrating to the lowest points and dripping off.) If you have this muffler indoors by the pump, it will last a very long time because the oil mist will prevent rusting. Outside, rain will slowly rust out the exterior.

A side benefit of the muffler/reclaimer is that your pump's air exhaust is now not so annoyingly screechingly loud.

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Funny that, we just had a problem with our dairy farm's automatic vacuum-drip oiler. The supply tube sucking oil from the bottle has a filter stone on the end that was plugged up, so oil wasn't flowing to the pump. How the filter stone gets plugged up sitting in pure clean oil is a mystery to me...

[Dennis H.]

On the oil reclaimer thing if the oil is coming out clean and you are using vac to pull oil into the pump then you can have the oil drain back into the tank that feeds the pump.

You can flood a vane pump by allowing alot of oil into it and capturing it and cooling it and reusing it. The oil will carry the heat out of the pump allowing you to run higher vac.

What I have been told is that once you start running above 18" of Vac you will need some means of cooling or you will cook the vanes and destroy the pump.
Remember that they were originally designed to run at 15" of vac not 20 and above like what we do with them.

[chrisnjake9]

Be careful i have not been able to find rebuild parts for the 73 or 75 and if he has been using them in maple they might be worn out

[Rossell's Sugar Camp]

They were used for His dairy farm. Thanks for all the info guys