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Wood shops harbor many perils. Obviously, there are the tools themselves, electrical wiring, heavy objects, trip hazards, poisonous and flammable fumes and fluids, etc. It turns out that the wood dust created by power machinery is, itself, a dangerous and often-ignored carcinogen.

Our "dust redistribution" system is not the best, but I describe it here in the event that the wood shop dust collection 01 might be useful to others. First, our bodies are able to deal with larger, common dust particles quite reliably, and common air is filled with particles that we are constantly filtering. However, the smallest particles, those under about 10 microns in size, tend to go right past our body's filtering system and can end up deep in the lungs where they irritate the tissue to differing degrees depending upon the material, concentration and our sensitivity.

Long term irritation of this kind might result in any number of chronic diseases, including those that accelerate one's otherwise distant demise; most people like to avoid this, myself included. The little paper masks sold everywhere, though fine for preventing large particle entry -- particles the body can deal wood shop dust collection 01 anyway -- appear practically useless when it comes to wood shop dust collection 01 these small particles.

Unfortunately, most of the dust collection systems sold are also a joke. Shop vacuums and most air filters weed out the largest particles -- the visible chips -- but pump the small ones right back into wood shop dust collection 01 air where they can circulate for hours.

Once the particles are in the air, you have to scrub the air or change it. No one wants to wear a respirator all day long, and such wood shop dust collection 01 systems are difficult to design, more difficult to install, and cost a LOT of money. We wear the full-face respirators when working with machines that wood shop dust collection 01 considerable dust, and we keep the dust handlers running any time a machine is running, and often for some time thereafter.

The next step up is 4 inch ports; larger wood shop dust collection 01 are found only on the largest machines in production shops. The bad news is that, under most circumstances, even a 4 inch port, good ducting and a good V blower is insufficient to capture the dust at the source.

For example, engineers recommend an airflow of almost cubic wood shop dust collection 01 per minute to capture the majority of the dust generated by a typical table saw the figure covers saws up to 16" in diameter -- smaller saws do not require quite this much airflow. At V a really good blower can push out a little over cubic feet per minute if it has little or no line resistance.

An ideal, simple system would have 6" ports and 6" or larger ducting all the way to the blower. To keep larger chips and particles moving through the lines, the air must have a linear speed around feet per minute. The needed duct diameter is therefore at least 6 inches to meet these minimums. A much more powerful blower might allow the selection of smaller ducting, but we are talking probably about a 5HP blower, very efficient designs, etc.

They are usually underpowered at the blower, do not actually retain the small and damaging particles but pump them right back into the airand do not move enough air due to hose and ducting restrictions to collect the problem particles in the first place. They collect the chips that might be Dust Collection Systems For Woodworking Shops Number unsightly, but recirculate the ones that are actually dangerous. But we went at this a little differently due to space and financial constraints.

In our system we attempt to get all of the larger particles to drop out before getting to the blower, and we simply blow the air containing wood shop dust collection 01 small particles into the outside atmosphere where God's nature takes over and does an excellent job, I might add. Most of our tools have 4" ports.

Not ideal, but better than nothing We use a 4" hose to connect our tooling to a shop made particle separator -- basically a poor-man's cyclone assembly, sans the impeller, on top of a 30 gallon can. However, a lot of dust still gets spun free of the collection hoses by the machinery. There just isn't enough air moving to capture the wind from a 12" blade at rpm. Side note: We used to have the commonly-available trashcan separator lid.

It is a piece of you-know-what. We then made our own separator lid modeled after a cyclone pump and experienced an immediate, significant increase in airflow. It used to be that we couldn't get our 4" flex hose to pick up dust off the floor without placing it directly over the dust. Now, it sucks up almost anything -- even heavier chips and chunks -- within 6" of the opening.

It looks like we might even wood shop dust collection 01 to do some redesign on our trash can separator because the increased flow is keeping it a little too clean. The first real velocity drop takes place in the can. The velocity drop, swirling motion and turbulence allow large particles to fall out of the air stream and into the bottom of the can.

A 6" line proceeds straight up from the center of the can lid, up a couple feet where it transitions to 8" and connects with our main, 8" duct. I've opened up the 8" line for inspection and cleaning from time to time while the blower was running. It can really move air when the resistance is gone. One time a couple years ago "the help" used the system to vacuum the shop and allowed the can to overfill. The blower was on, and with the decreased resistance, it cranked up and scoured the line clean.

All of the garbage got sucked into the blower and it began shaking badly. It is a squirrel cage blower, but with some tedious cleaning and picking, all was fine. Anything of measurable mass is going to fall out and back into the can hopefully. Only the smallest, lightest particles will remain suspended in the air flow, getting pushed through the 8" line, to the blower and outside.

This way, no chips hit the blower. This kind of system makes for some cold days in the shop in winter and hot days wood shop dust collection 01 the summer, since any air it moves gets replaced by air pulled into the shop from the house or outside, but it keeps it much cleaner. If you have a gas furnace or anything of the like, however, it is very important not to implement this kind of a system, as it could pull gas into your house and shop, blow up the whole building, and basically ruin your whole day.

By keeping the system running, we are constantly changing the air in the shop, too, so any dust that escapes collection at the source eventually gets picked up. We custom built the blower box to hold the largest V blower we could find.

It takes about FPM to keep wood particles moving horizontally in a pipe. We're sure that this drops once we add the can and 4" lines, but it is working thus far. Even if we are getting only half of that much air movement, our shop contains cubic feet of air, which means that our system "changes" the shop wood shop dust collection 01 every 20 wood shop dust collection 01 or so.

I quote "changes" because it is really a matter of constantly diluting the dust-contaminated shop air with outside air, not really changing or replacing it. It turns out that too much dust is actually getting pulled outside by our present system, not trapped in the can. Big chips are settling in our horizontal eight inch line, the heaviest chips staying in wood shop dust collection 01 collection can, and everything else is getting blown into our back yard.

I upgraded all of our tools and collection lines to six wood shop dust collection 01 diameter, and inserted a ClearVue cyclone separator. It is merely resting on the can and a foam seal. When the can fills, a pull on the rope lifts the cyclone assembly off of the can so it may be dumped. It all takes about a minute. However, this meant that the exhaust line had to be flexible, so one of the duct joints is not wood shop dust collection 01 with tape, but covered with flexible eight inch hose so that it can move when the cyclone is lifted without creating an air leak.

The maker of the cyclone separator said that our blower wouldn't have enough power to work, but it turns out that it works fine as long as we don't get too much resistance in the line.

When resistance increases, airflow decreases, and the forces that separate dust in the cyclone diminish, resulting in more wood shop dust collection 01 dust getting pulled out the exhaust line.

By upgrading all of our tools to six inch dust collection ports, the resistance is about as low as we're going to get it and still maintain the air velocity necessary to carry the chips.

It is much better than our prior setup. I can hand-dump two cups of saw dust directly into the line and see almost nothing coming out of the exhaust.

We also have much greater airflow at the tools now. This required pulling all of the plates and plugs off of the blade shroud, covering and plugging almost every hole in the tool, and creating a tight skirt around where it meets the floor.

Most of this was done with magnetic sheet material. Now there is significant airflow downward around the blade and chips and dust from cuts drop straight to the floor, where they are picked up by one of two four inch hoses that come together outside the machine into our six inch general collection hose. With these changes, we now have much better dust collection at all of the tools, and far more dust is being trapped in our collection can and not being blown outside where it makes a mess or might annoy neighbors.

I've been looking for a downdraft sanding table for use in our shop for a couple years without finding the exact one we wanted. These were the requirements:. It took about one full day to build. I'm not sure about its weight capacity yet -- I may need to do some reinforcement on the lower deck.

But otherwise it works great. In when upgrading our general dust collection, we added sliding walls to the downdraft table to improve the direction of the airflow. We offer community classes on beginning and intermediate woodworking one evening per week.

Give us a call if you are interested. No need to spend hundreds on a router table and lift mechanism. Assuming you already have the router and basic tools, this is all you need:. The rest is fairly obvious.