Dust Collector

We'll after a couple months of cutting wood up in the garage/shop the place was accumulating quite a bit of saw dust. So, we decided to put in a dust collector system that hooks up to all of the equipment in the shop to remove the dust when it is running. This is not something that is totally out of the blue we have been thinking about putting one in the shop for a little while.

First step was to figure out where to put it......The best spot that we could figure was in the downstairs portion of the shop so that it would be easy to run all of the pipes and send them up through the floor. Plus it also makes it easy to get to the bags for removal and checking of the levels.

With that decision the ground was cleared and a form built to pour a concrete slab for the thing to sit on. The form was built so that the pad would be 1.5" below where a "finished" floor would go if we want to continue the floor that is in part of the downstairs.

This picture shows the Smith family tradition of trying bury anything you really don't want to take to the dump (that tennis court looks like it is in the same place where Russell's boat used to be?) There were some random broken cinder blocks, bricks and some other offcuts from building the small garden bed in the back yard.

Four bags of concrete later and it looks like this. I also put in some J bolts that hold down 2x4's to the top surface and the dust collector bottom plate attaches to those.


Here is the dust collector assembled and placed on top of the pad. In this picture none of the 4" ducting is run upstairs to the equipment.
All of the ducts and blast gates (the valves that turn on or off the flow at the tool) have been put in place. There currently is one branch that goes over to the lathe and another that goes over to the table saw and router table. The vacuum works great with only one minor hitch...you can only power the tool or the dust collector at once! I knew this was going to happen in advance so I was not surprised at all. I am going to bring out a new 50 Amp 220 Volt line and put in a subpanel in the garage to power the lights/power tool/dust collector. Should be done on that one shortly.