I built this mini dust collector about eight months ago,
and it's just a box with a couple of furnace filters in it,
and a blower with a tiny shaded pull motor.
And, that's normally wired in so that when I turn on
this strip sander, it turns on automatically.
It seems to be working well enough, because the airborne
particle counts, right next to my strip sander,
don't seem to increase substantially when I'm using it.
The air comes out of this thing right here.
So, I'll put my particle counter next to that
to measure how much dust is coming out of it when I'm using
my strip sander.
I think the filter if very effective, because the air
at the outlet is very clean.
Let's see what it looks like on the inside.
The filter is coated with quite a lot of fine dust,
but it seems to fall down towards the bottom,
especially if I bump it. Maybe a lot of this
actually fell down from just taking it out.
So, this second filter, behind the first one,
still looks perfectly clean.
Maybe I only need one filter.
This thing was really kind of an experiment,
but it works really well, so I'm gonna build another one
for my other belt sander. This time I bought
a larger furnace filter, and to try to make
the case more compact, I slit it here,
and I'm gonna try to fold it,
and mount it in the case, like that.
If I pull the air out between the filters,
I really don't need a lot of space in here,
just some space around it for the dust.
Which means I can make the box just 18 centimeters wide,
and 27 centimeters high, on the inside.
Man, that's an awfully small box
to be cramming to be cramming such a big filter into.
I'm gluing a couple of rails on the inside of the box
to help control the position of the filter.
To keep the filter from sliding this way too much,
I'm gonna add a strip here,
and another one here. And, those should be about
this far from the inside of the box.
Now, once that filter is completely caked with dust,
and I have a lot of suction, it's possible that the filter
might collapse on itself, like this, so to prevent that
from happening, I've got these two things
that go in the back panel, like this.
For the blower on this one, I'm gonna use
a exhaust blower from an old hot water heater.
And, this was torn off the garbage in a hurry,
so it's kind of busted here
and I've got another, this one is also busted in the same way,
and I just cleared up this whole area, and I also opened
the exhaust way up, just to get more air flow,
and that will go on here, but because the squirrel cage
is recessed a little bit, to keep the air from circulating
around the front, I'm gonna add this ring, like that, here.
I want a lid with a tight seal on here,
so I made these four pieces,
and those are on just gonna go on the lid, like this.
I let the glue dry on the first two pieces
before gluing the rest on, just to make it easier.
I was just thinking, maybe I shouldn't have that blast of air
going straight up against the filter,
so I glued a bit of fabric in there, just to protect it.
It was quite a blast of air coming out,
and if I seal the input,
almost none coming out. So, I think I have a good seal.
And, now I have it set in place, wired into the switch
with this belt sander, which makes it very convenient to use.
And, here's an update, two weeks later.
I liked the idea of a small dust collector so much
I made another one that attaches directly to the bottom
of my table saw, and it's wired right into the switch.
I added a fence in here, so that the course dust
stays in the saw, and the fine dust gets sucked back here.
And, every once in a while, I'll just have to vacuum this out.
But, testing it's effectiveness
using my Dillows particle counter
it turns out this was not nearly as effective
as my big dust collector, even though
the actual net air flow at the saw was almost the same.
And, so I've been doing more testing, and it turns out
these 3M Filtrete filters, these cost like $19.00 each.
Turns out to be much less effective than these cheap ones.
I can get two of these for $10.00.
So, my recommendation is
test your filters, and don't buy the fancy ones.
These cheap Garrison's work really well.
So, now I'm in the process of taking my second
mini dust collector, I threw out the 3M filter,
and I'm gonna put two of the Garrison filters in there.
Why two? Because the box is big enough
I can stack two of them if they're folded.
So, my thinking now is, instead of having duct work everywhere
and automatic blast gates, and automatic power control
for the dust collector. It's a lot easier
to just have a dust collector at every machine.
So far I got one here, here, and here.
And, one of these days, I'll make one for the planer,
and for the jointer.