I didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about sawdust before I built the CNC machine. Now, I think of little else.
Everything in the garage is covered in a fine layer of sawdust.
So, I have been thinking about putting in a dust collection system , and hooking it up to all the power tools. The router table and chop saw already have dust collection ports. The CNC machine, of course, just awaits my customization. The question is how to get the Shop Vac involved; the sheer amount of dust that comes in blocks up filters very quickly, and any larger particles get stuck in the 1-1/4″ hose.
So I started looking around for solutions, and ran across The Dust Deputy. It’s essentially a cyclonic pre-filter for the Shop Vac; it whirls the incoming dust around, and dumps all the heavy stuff into a 5-gal collection bucket, instead of into the Shop Vac’s filter.
A friend of mine bought me a Dust Deputy for Christmas this year. w00t!
I had to spend a little time scratching my head figuring out how to get the thing working. I needed to pick up a bunch of vacuum hose as well as a bucket, lid, gasket, and bolts. One nifty thing that I discovered is that, although my Shop Vac came with 1-1/4″ attachments, it actually supports 2-1/2″ attachments as well, so I converted everything to the larger hose diameter. grunt. More power.
I pressed the CNC machine into service to cut the bolt pattern (it’s a 6-bolt hexagon pattern — more trig! Yay!) and hole in the lid of the bucket. Note to future self: CNC machine will cut rubber gasket, but gasket needs to be held down with something stronger than blue painter’s tape. Despite my best efforts, the CNC cut was not perfect. But it’s more than close enough to do the job, so I bolted everything together, and set about cleaning up all the sawdust that I had created last weekend while rebuilding Trixie (plus the extra from this weekend’s Dob conversion and the test cuts I’d done for the Dust Deputy lid…).
In short, it did great! I haven’t checked the Shop Vac’s chamber yet (and it had a little sawdust in it anyway), but the Deputy seemed to be doing its whirly thing, and the bucket is definitely heavier. Also, there’s a *lot* less sawdust in the garage. Very cool.
Here’s a photo of the new “system”:
So the nozzle hooks to the side of the Dust Deputy (which of course bolts to the lid of the bucket) and then the hose going out of the top of the Dust Deputy goes to the Shop Vac.
I spent a little time trying to figure out how to couple hoses to the Dust Deputy and finally decided that “au naturel” (hose directly connected to Dust Deputy) was easiest to implement. This means that the hoses attached to the Dust Deputy aren’t all that useful for being used by themselves (because any nozzles really want there to be a modular hose connector on the end of the hose). That’s fine by me. If I need to use the Shop Vac by itself, I will just go back to the 1-1/4″ gear, which already has all the modular stuff attached.
Another step towards “automatic” dust collection in the woodshop.