When you see the dust on the shelves, ledges and light fittings, you know something has to be done?
Recently, I bought a dust extractor with a top filter bag and lower dust collection bag. It?s the best addition to the shop I have made in a long time.
Hopefully the picture has uploaded?
A 4 inch suction hose connects to the machine, and this is often quite rigid, so I got a thinner 4 inch hose from a DIY store, such as Home Depot, to extend the overall hose length. These thin hoses are often used as ceiling ducts for small fans. This gives much more movement and flexibility.
You can have a lot of fun making ( or just buy ) a variety of hoods and connectors appropriate for your machines. This type of extractor has worked well on the scroll saw, bandsaw and particularly on the planer-thicknesser where it collects the majority of chippings - no longer big piles on the floor.
As the machine is on wheels, it also makes a great general vacuum cleaner and quickly keeps the floor and machines very clean.
It is relatively quiet, much more so than most shop vacs which I now use just to get into hard to reach corners. I believe most users won?t see noise as an issue.
Some days, you just want to get on and scrollsaw and I switch the extractor on later and clean up.
Often, manufacturers provide coarse filter bags at around 30 micron filtration. These capture chippings, but fine dust will come through the bag into the shop.For general work I would recommend a bag with filtration better than 5 microns, around 2 microns if possible. If you cut MDF a lot, 0.5 to 1 micron would be better still. The great news is that as the filter bag gets dirty, filtration improves ? though performance does reduce of course.
Not too expensive, especially if you buy used as I did ? around 80 dollars (U.S.)
My shop, machines and general environment have never been so clean.
Overall a great investment.
Happy scrolling - Paul
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