Garageneering A Dust Collection System: Part 1a: The Slightly More Coherent Version

A few years ago I spent an afternoon ripping dimension lumber. My shop got so dusty the air was like fog. At some point “toughing it out” is dumb and bad for your health. (Also the dust was screwing up a fiberglass / epoxy project I was working on!)

I decided to do something. (Unlike politicians, when I say I’ll “do something” I actually do it.)

I’m a cheap cuss so I scoured Craigslist. I scored a dust collector that looks almost exactly like this:Below you’ll find a link to it on Amazon. Note: I don’t have that model, I have a older one of a brand I don’t recognize. However, in design and components they seem functionally identical. Both have 1HP motors and I can’t see what would be different about them. If both sawdust sucking machines are 1 HP and suck sawdust adequately what could be different; Fahrvergnügen, Corinthian leather, Martinizing?

I got it for roughly half the cost of buying new. Note: In retrospect (and rechecking my Amazon link) I think I got my Craigslist version for under a third the cost of a new one. I rock!

The only difference between my model (dated 1995) and the one on Amazon is that mine is a different color, a no name brand, and lacks wheels. (I could slap on $15 worth of wheels but so far it hasn’t been necessary. You don’t move a sawdust collector so much as route its function with hose.)

Also 1995 is 24 years ago unless you learned new math in American public school in which case it’s 14 years if you feel it ought to be. 🙂

Like all Craigslist purchases, acquiring it was interesting. After a bit of phone tag, I met some dude in a parking lot a day’s drive from my house. (I was traveling.) I know what you’re thinking when I say “some dude” but this guy was wearing a suit and tie. It was just before a city’s rush hour morning commute and we met in a bank parking lot that wasn’t his office and wasn’t yet open; just a mutually convenient highway exit. He was probably on his way to some corporate CEO gig while I was on my way to freeze my ass in the middle of nowhere.

We unloaded the dusty old collector from his Lexus and tossed it in my Dodge. (Who carries a sawdust collector in a Lexus?) I paid cash. I also reflected how the machine was changing position in the class structure. Destined to an uncertain future in the heart of redneck “frugality”; it left a heated Lexus and wound up stuffed it in a garbage bag and lying on a snowy truck bed.

I stuck up a conversation with Tie-boy (yes, I have biases… lots of people wear ties and he was probably a really nice guy. Also he probably though of me as Bearded Dumbass.) However, there’s a method to my madness, whenever I buy anything on Craigslist I talk to the seller enough to satisfy myself I’m not buying stolen shit. If I smell anything fishy, the deal’s off. I was thinking “who’d you get this collector from”? My initial impression being  he was selling Grandpa’s old shit. Maybe putting the proceeds towards payments on his McMansion, trophy wife, or the Lexus. (I’m terribly biased.)

After five minutes talking it was clear my impressions were wrong. He was quite knowledgeable. Likely he does higher end woodworking (as a hobby) that I could do if my life depended on it. I got the idea he had two separate and independent dust collectors serving a veritable army of expensive stationary woodworking machines. I think he was ditching this old one so he’d have a matched pair of collectors. I think a matched pair of any power equipment is pretty awesome!

It just goes to show you can’t judge the Tie-boy by his Lexus.

At home I was delighted to verify I hadn’t been screwed. It ran great. Also not too loud… which is delightful.

When you fire up a collector of this type the upper bag inflates. (The upper bag is a cyclone area, the dust goes into the lower bag.) The Jet model in the picture has a hanging rod that looks like an IV Bag holder. It keeps the bag in place when it’s deflated. Mine lacks that; probably never had it. I ran it for a while without any bag suspension (I doubt it matters) but just to be sure I eventually strung p-cord from the ceiling to the bag. It looks silly but works great.

The bag had another surprise. Someone had dripped a string of paint dots on the bag. This has no effect on the bag’s function. It’s hardly noticeable…

WAIT A MINUTE! Are those paint dots or blood?

I got out a lens and examined closely. I think they’re blood droplets! I’m not NCIS and I’m not going to send it to a lab and I honestly think “blood spatter analysis” is at best a crude guess (unlike the voodoo magic they imply on TV)… but I suspect my sawdust collector has seen things. (Either that or it’s just paint and I have an active imagination.) Think about it, this machine has spent nearly a quarter century servicing groups of stationary woodworking machines; all are capable of lopping off a few fingers in a nanosecond. Is it totally improbably that someone’s severed pinkie has bounced off this machine? Regardless, the machine works and it’s just a few drops, not something from a horror movie. (I kinda’ like the detail too. It gives it “character” and reminds me to be careful, which is a good thing.)

In case you’re wondering, Tie-boy had all ten. I think. I wasn’t specifically looking.

Back to mundane logistics, the collector is just part of the puzzle. For a while I used it with a single hose clamped to one machine at a time. What a PITA.

For any semblance of convenience, you need to route suction from the collector to all of your dust sources (i.e. your stationary wood cutting/finger lopping machines). Note: I’ve been purposely trying to learn hand tools too. One of the cool things about chisels and hand planes is that you make a lot less dust and a lot less noise. It’s vastly more peaceful. You can go Zen with a plane, but with a table saw you need your head in the game! I try to use hand tools as much as possible. Don’t laugh, it may be a dying art but hand tools are amazingly useful. Some of the time they’re almost as fast (or faster) than power equipment and often they’re more precise. (Hand tools can lop off a finger too, some things are always the same.)

Back at the ranch… I needed to route suction to all of my power tools. The obvious solution for is hose made for that purpose. Duh! In my case 4″ hose. It should look like this:

Here’s the amazon link. And no, I don’t have any cool hose like that .

The nearest place I could find suitable hose is 80 miles away. It was opaque (clear would be much better) and it was expensive. I bought one 10′ section. It worked OK but it just killed me to pay the high price. Even on Amazon you’re in the ballpark of $3 a foot. As you’ll see later, most of my system is based on 4″ thinwall sewer/vent pipe. I lost the receipt but I suspect pipe goes for a buck a foot or so. Roughly 2/3 less than special purpose clear hose.

Setting up a dust collector properly can nickel and dime you to death!

But wait, there’s more. In my case I have 4 machines that are dust makers; a table saw, a thickness planer, a radial arm saw, and a bandsaw. If I route to all four and turn on the suction, it won’t work. It’ll lack the power to clear the machine in use if simultaneously wasting 3/4 of its flow on three currently unused machines.

Enter the device with the best name ever; blast gates. A blast gate is an overly awesome sounding way to say “valve” for your suction hose. The blast gate on vacuum hose functions just like a gate valve on a water pipe. With the delightful twist that you don’t have to get uptight about sawdust. A leaky pipe is a big deal but a little dust leaking out of a fitting in your shop is completely irrelevant. That’s why I built my system to be mostly friction fit together. I’m good with PVC and pipe cementing but for dust I stuffed ’em together like Tinkertoys. That way I can pull it apart if (when!) something clogs. Also I can easily reconfigure if (when!) I decide I deserve (need!) another stationary power tool.

Some blast gates are plastic and look comically chintzy. The grossed me out on principle. Here’s what appears to be a medium quality aluminum model:

Here’s the Amazon link. (No, I don’t have any commercially made blast gates. See the pattern?)

Even if I was willing to spend the scratch, it pissed me off that I can’t buy one within 100 miles of my house. Even the place with the overpriced hose was out of gates. WTF! Everyone in the goddamn world has a table saw and all I wanted to do was “level up” to keep my lungs a bit safer and suddenly I’m shopping for exotic shit? In a world where I can buy 60 kinds of yogurt in any grocery store, how hard should it be to locally stock a few dust collection components? Also, get those damn kids off my lawn!

Lucky for me I’m an Adaptive Curmudgeon. It’s sawdust, not uranium. Also God and Al Gore gave us the internet. There are a million you-tube videos of how to fabricate all this crap. The videos are all made by people who are better woodworkers than me (a few of them may own a Lexus). I watched a couple to get the idea and subsequently made mine entirely as I saw fit.

So, aside from the 24 year old vac and one length of opaque hose, I built everything else from scratch or local sources. I used 1/4″ plywood, adhesive, sewer pipe, and a pile of shop vac accessories I found at the local hardware store. It wasn’t free but I estimate it was well under half the cost of buying new components. Also it doesn’t look too ugly and it seems to work perfectly.

This is the internet so pics or it didn’t happen. Stay tuned.