Workshop dust collection

I currently run two forms of dust collection - a shop vac (sometimes with secondary interceptor cyclone), and a large double bag style chip collector. At the moment I have to hook up individual hoses for the tool in use at the time. Something more "built in" would be nice.

It occurs to me that 110mm soil pipe is cheap and redly available. Has anyone created a working system with it?

If so how well does it work? How much dust collector power have you got at the head end?

Another thought that springs to mind, I could make more workshop space by shifting the dust collector into the adjacent garage. In the summer this would be ok, but in the winter it would be pumping warm air out of the workshop. Has anyone experimented with "bagging and ducting" the top bag of a traditional chip collector? (so the filtered air could be returned to the workshop)

Reply to
John Rumm
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3hp, 14" blower, home brew cyclone servicing 10 drops with blast gates over 30 sq m workshop floor area. Bill Pentz style noise reducer and fine dust filters in the roof. Standard plastic 100mm blast gates will glue into open ended 110mm pipe with foam PU glue to form a 110 to 100mm adaptor for flexi hose.

Here is my set up in the very early days. The workshop was set up around it as it made the installation easy.

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pm me if you need any further info John

Reply to
Bob Minchin

OOPs I see it only has 8 drops now I watch the video again. Works fine and pulls shavings from 8" planer from the furthest point with no problems.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Minchin

There is supposed to be an issue with static electricity build up and explosion/fire risk.

I opted for the spiral wound metal fixed piping and plastic flexi to reach the machines. The spiral wound plastic must have a smooth inner skin as the corrugations cause huge suction losses.

Reply to
Tim Lamb

Even though that fear is often mentioned, I have serious doubts its actually worth worrying about. The minimum ignition energy required for a perfect stoichiometric mix of wood dust and air is probably in the order of 20 to 30 mJ, and there is no chance you are going to get that from static discharge.

You can cause a dust explosion by ingesting hotmetal shards (grinding sparks say) - but earthing your ductwork will do little to mitigate that.

Reply to
John Rumm

Nice setup - I think I had seen static photos of your workshop before, but could not remember who's it was. I get the feeling long and narrow is actually a better workspace than my squarer layout - since you either want lots of in and outfeed space into tools, or lots of wall space to line them up against)

I have a suspicion that my current limitation may be lack of blower power (my SIP collector is only 1hp IIRC). Having said that, its "filtration" is far less sophisticated and probably loses less power into the process.

Ta.

Reply to
John Rumm

Certainly a good infeed outfeed length is helpful. with a good tidy up (!) I can rip 3.9m with the table saw and the outfeed table is about 2m behind the blade so the work does not tip once it has exited the saw. However width is useful too when working with sheet material and I'm very limited on width which is a PITA. Width was originally dictated by a 100yr old tree. Frustratingly that has now died!

In an ideal world a table saw needs to sit in the centre of a 16 foot square which enables a 1mm cut to be taken off any edge of an 8 x 4 sheet without having to flip it over. Ceiling height needs to be greater than the diagonal of an 8 x 4 sheet so you can swing it corner to corner. Sadly not many of us have that luxury.

I suspect you are correct in that 1hp will be a bit underpowered. If you can arrange for the planer (greatest rate of waste generated) to be closest to the blower it will help. You can sometimes find bigger blowers/motors on ebay?

If you have to reduce pipe size for portable tools, make the length of the smaller bore hose as short as possible as the airflow is very significantly reduced by the friction in the small hose.

Bob

Reply to
Bob Minchin

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