We're giving up the house and moving to a condo. This means moving my shop from my 3-car garage to the basement. As I have a bit of COPD, I need to be more careful of dust and solvents. The three open garage doors were a b lessing.
I use conventional dust masks while sanding and have a 2hp dust collector. Any recommendations on a suitable air filtration system that won't set me back a fortune? Also ... any thoughts on the benefit of a full face respir ator? Kind of the equivalent of a condom, eh?
You might want to look at something similar to this.
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Two separate filters, multi-speed. remote switch and timer off.
You could also fabricate one out of an old FAU saving only the fan compartment, but something similar to this will get you guaranteed results if sized for your work area. If you have a window area you could put in a small duct booster fan for fresh air at one side and at the other use the same thing for an exhaust fan. With the three done properly you can in essence have your
3 car fresh air options, still, for safety health reasons get a good comfortable, easy to breath through mask system if you have copd.
Only comment on the dust collection is to capture it at the source/tool bef ore it gets into the air. If you are capturing the dust in those air filtr ation systems that hang from the ceiling, then it is too late. Its already in the air AND your LUNGS. Look at the European tools. They seem to pay more attention to dust collection and safety of the user. Festool is a fre quently mentioned brand. And others. The full face respirators make sense . They put clean air over your face to breathe and keep the dirty, dusty a ir out of your lungs.
"Gramps' shop" wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:
Want to give a Trend AirShield Pro a try? I can't use it because the dry moving air drives my sinuses nuts and I wind up with a cold. I'd be willing to send it to you to try for a bit with the promise of some kind of trade in turn.
Maybe a halfway decent Stanley hand plane or two, Bosch Jigsaw, lathe tooling, or even just some nice hardwood... Something along those lines.
Well at the risk of sounding like a broken record,,,
An alternative to air filtration which might not get the dust before your nose does consider a vac hooked directly to your sanders. I personally can't stand any type mask on my face. I recall hot and humid inside.
Anyway Festool, Fein and a few others make HEPA rated shop vacs that are quiet and very effective used with their same brand sanders. I have been using the Festool vac and sanders for 7~8 years and I'll never go back to not using this type set up or a noisy shop vac.
Yes it is expensive but maybe not much more than adding an air filtration system that actually works well enough for you to not breath in dust. I typically go straight from sanding to staining or varnishing with out having to remove dust after sanding. AND I can walk straight into the house with out bringing in dust after sanding.
Exactly! I think room air filtration simply keeps the fine dust off of everything in the shop, a little better than nothing at all but the dust has to be in the air floating around before getting to the filtration system.
SWMBO already has spoken to me about tracking shop effluent into the new digs. Depending on what she wants to spend on new flooring and the new kitchen, I may have a couple of bucks left over for shop stuff. Then again, probably not.
Try as I might that doesn't work out in practice as well as it does in theory... Dust escapes off the top of the saw blade, out of the sides of sheet/disk sanders, off the ends of belt sanders, around the band saw blade, etc. As such I use an ambient air filter to grab the airborne particles. I also set up a dust collector hose to draw air from around items being sanded that isn't captured by the collection on the tool itself. I do the same thing when using things like a circular saw or trim saw. Between those measures and the ambient air filter I capture most of the airborne dust pretty well. The chips and shavings coming off the jointer and thickness planer are less of an airborne issue but they do need to be removed to avoid clogging up the machines...
Another solution is to not use power tools or dry sand anything. ;~) I'll perfectly happy to use my froe, hand saws, hand planes, spoke shaves, scrapers, chisels, etc. to dimension stock and create the joinery. Shavings and chips from hand tools don't tend to become air borne beyond their trip to the floor. ;~)
I'm not too worried about breathing the saw dust that flies off the front of the table saw. It's pretty big stuff. Sanders are another matter, entirely. I think dust collection at the source is key, here.
IMHO the dust that is produced by a TS, BS, jointer etc is not the dust that is going to be as harmful as the dust coming off of the sanders.
Not trying to be a smart ass but until you use a Festool sander and vac with HEPA certification you have not seen what can actually be captured.
Some does escape, but typically not enough to be a problem. As I have commented earlier I don't carry dust into the house after sanding. In fact I produce much more dust when using a 4" square piece of sand paper to hand sand to ease over a few edges that gets away during the sanding of a whole job using the Festool setup. About 8 years ago I refaced a kitchen for a customer. He taped off the openings of the cabinets on the inside so that the edges of the face frames were exposed. I sanded for about an hour going through 3 grits and he could find no dust on the counter tops. He felt that taping the cabinets was a waste of his time. But in all seriousness I can run my sander over the edge of a panel and see the dust fall away and immediately get sucked back up into the sander from mid air.
I was going to let you do the Festool commercial. ;-)
But you're right. I don't have the Festool Vac (yet) but have been sanding today with a Crapsman shop vac with a HEPA filter. The escaped dust is minimal but it is there. The sander isn't exactly clean after use. I didn't worry about traipsing upstairs without changing clothes, though. SWMBO didn't yell at me, either. ;-)
BTW, the Granat paper is great stuff. I did have trouble with the edges fraying, though. I was doing inside corners and a lot of edges, though.
I remember the days when I had to blow off, change clothes. and take a shower after sanding. I hardly have to take a shower more than once a month now. ;~)
Yeah, I think I may have said somewhere that I thought the Ruben paper was heavier and I originally had doubts about the toughness of the Granat. But it will last and last and is hard to clog. It is tougher however than the paper it supposedly replaced, the Cristal, IIRC>
If solid wood was the only thing going through the table saw I'd be less concerned about it.... running MDF, particle board, PVC, PT, and other "man made" products through it is another story... as such my ambient air cleaner is positioned to pull the air away from the operator of the table saw. Though the chips are pretty well handled by the dust collection it is not unusual to find the area around the jointer, BS, thickness planer, shaper, and router table covered with fine dust and the filters on my ambient air cleaner support that observation. While sanding, whether by hand or power, I set up a a dust collector hose to draw the dust off and use the ambient air cleaner. Except for around bench height I stay pretty clean when sanding. I "shower" with the dust collector hose before leaving the shop.
Tracking things out of the shop on the bottom of my shoes is the biggest problem. I think I may have a solution to that. I got a large entry door mat at Sam's Club last fall. That thing is amazing... When I take my English Setter out I make him dance around on the mat to clean his paws. I no longer have mud/gravel/grass clippings/leaf litter/water/etc. coming into the house on his paws. The mat does an excellent job of cleaning off shoes too so I plan to get another one for the shop door.
Festool does have a good track record in that regard. However, I imagine that like many others my tool assortment started 30+ years ago and consists of other brands... I've got almost all Porter-Cable tailed hand tools (at least 15 of them that I can think of without visiting the shop) and most of them are 20+ years old. I've been able to get parts for them to keep them running so I don't anticipate replacing any of them unless they totally fail. As such, unless I have a large cash windfall that allows me to abandon everything I own I don't see Festool in my future. ;~)
"John Grossbohlin" wrote in news:ysudnXGR6ZOyxUHLnZ2dnUU7-W snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:
I was really impressed with a new Bosch ROS a few months ago. Even without a vacuum attached (I didn't have one at my aunt's house), it got about 90% of the dust. Sure wasn't bad at all.
Putting things in context: If I were doing this day in day out to make a living I'd be doing a lot of things differently... I'd have at least 6-10 times more floor space; Ceilings at least 12'; Bigger cyclone dust collector located in it's own room/shed; Larger spiral pipe for the dust collection trunk lines with hard piped connections to machines; Larger ambient air cleaners; Separate room/building for finishing with air handling/filtration; A panel saw or large electronic table saw with scoring blade and sliding tables to supplement my 3 HP cabinet saw; a 20-24" jointer to supplement my
8", A big European style band saw to replace my 110 year old 36" Crescent band saw to gain resaw capacity, etc. Last but not least the tailed hand tools would probably be Festool. In the mean time, as a skilled part-time hobbyist, I'll stick with my dust collector/ambient air cleaner and work practices to control the dust from power tools, and continue to use my tailless hand tools. Since I made the last series of stationary tool and dust handling upgrades 12 years ago airborne dust has been greatly reduced and I've had no problems with my eyes, nose, or lungs while working in the shop... even on those relatively rare occasions when I had to do a lot of powered dry sanding.
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