Made some progress with my dust collection system today, as a shipment from Dustpipe Inc. arrived. I had revised the design several times – here’s the latest version (of 4):
The revisions to the drawing are on account to several re-arrangements of my shop space in past weeks as I get ready for the new aircraft carrier (jointer) to make its way into port, scheduled to happen in a couple of days.
The piping is all quality spiral steel, no plastic or building yard HVAC piping. I thought I’d share a few pics of the parts going together. I’m about halfway through hooking it up, and need a few more parts before I can complete the work (those needed parts are colored red in the preceding drawing).
I assembly the parts together and then rivet them. After that they will be wrapped with industrial aluminum sheet duct sealing tape.
I was hoping to re-use more of the piping that came with my collection system, but really only about 10% is going to be re-usable – the painted bits – like the 10″ primary duct:
The first fitting to the primary duct is a reducing lateral, them most expensive component in the piping system. The metal ducting is not an inexpensive proposition, and, like the collector itself, hardly glamorous. But important and I’m glad to have it at last.
It took a while to get the first section up by myself as the plenum to the cyclone was inconveniently sized and I had to make a custom sleeve to join the pipe and plenum. One of the stepladders came in handy as a temporary support for the two 8″ elbows which bring the pipe up in height a bit:
Here I’ve connected the floor vacuum pickup:
The 6″ down-pipe for the floor vacuum will have a couple of spur lines at 3″ size going right and left, one for the router table (visible to the right of the down pipe) and one for the Kapex.
Another look at the floor vac intake:
The green bit of ply on the wall is the site of a soon to be built plywood cabinet for storing all my cutters – planer knives, router bits, shaper heads, etc. Slowly but surely things are getting organized after the re-organizing of the shop.
Then I got the 8″ pipe run popped into place, but not firmly connected or leveled out quite yet:
Another view:
Dust collection is so important to a shop if you run machinery and it is an area I have made do with hokey crap systems in the past – or had nothing. It feels good to get a decent system in there and I look forward to having a shop with a whole lot less dust in it. I expect I’ll be able to complete the dust collection hookup by sometime early next week. Just waiting on some parts – and a new machine!
All for today – thanks for dropping by the Carpentry Way. On to part II