I am really not a fan of miter saws.
And, the reasons are, first of all, they're less accurate
than table saws, cause they have a bit of flex into them.
But, the bigger reason is they omit a lot of dust,
whereas a table saw, most of the dust goes below the table,
so it's much cleaner. So, what I want to do
is test how much dust this kicks into the air,
versus the table saw, and I've been running my air cleaner
for quite a while, plus an oscillating fan,
just to make sure the air is well mixed in here.
And, I've got my particle counter here,
and the readings are quite low. so I'll start by making
some dust with the miter saw. So, with the fans turned off,
I'm going to make ten cuts on here,
and then run the fans to mix the air thoroughly,
and see what the particle count on here is going to end up.
So, now I'm just gonna let this fan mix the air for awhile.
And, let's see, we're already up to 8,000,
whereas before it was about 300 on the very fine particle count.
So, I'll leave that running for five to ten minutes,
and then I'll turn on my dust collector and air cleaners
to clean the air again for the next test.
Just look at this mess behind the saw.
Now that I've got the dust levels down again,
I'll turn off my air cleaner,
dust collector's already off,
fan off, and let's do that same test on the table saw.
Okay, let's spread that dust evenly
and see what the readings gonna be.
So, without any dust collection for both cases,
I had about half as much airborne dust from the table saw
Let's try it with dust collection.
I turned off dust collection as soon as I was done cutting,
because I wanted to see what equilibrium dust level
I get in the air. So, it was pretty hard
to see on the graph where exactly I used the table saw.
The amount of airborne dust coming out of it was maybe
one fifth without the dust collector, and less than a tenth
of what I got from the miter saw. Let's try the miter saw
with dust collection. I've got the hose hooked up
to my small dust collector, and just to make it fair,
I'm gonna run the big one while I'm doing the cutting too,
because I had that one running when I cut with the table saw.
Okay, now with the dust collector turned off,
I'm just letting the air reach equilibrium
and we'll see what kind of reading we'll get up to here.
It took a minute, but the dust has gotten to here eventually.
I knew there was a lot of dust in the air,
cause I could smell it. So, dust collection
was not very effective at catching all the sawdust
that came off with the saw, but surprisingly,
it did cut the airborne dust down by half.
So, the miter saw with dust collection will put about
as much dust into the air, as the table saw does without.
But, the table saw with dust collection puts about
a tenth of the dust into the air as the miter saw does without.
So, just out of curiosity, I made the same ten cuts
on my band saw without dust collection,
and the airborne dust from that was even less that the table saw
with dust collection, so I really don't
need much in the way of dust collection on here.
So, what makes the table saw so much less dusty?
Well, the key is an enclosure, and that way most of the dust
just circulates around inside and settles in there
instead of getting spread everywhere.
Now, if you have one of those newer table saws, that has a
spout coming out back here, that hooks up to a shop vac,
without the shop vac, it's probably not gonna be
much better than the miter saw. I should point out
that this cabinet is not completely sealed
I've got a big hole here, and there's actually a gap
between the stand and the table.
And, on my old table saw, I actually closed it off
on the bottom, plus I closed this off as much as possible,
and that also made it much less dusty.
And, why does the band saw make so little dust?
Well, the slower cutting speed of this saw probably helps,
and I've got a fairly tight enclosure on the bottom,
and the dust all just falls into this drawer here.