dust problem

Hi,

I don't have a dust collector, and I do have a dusty shop, so I'm sure not an expert.

It sounds like you are doing everything right, so you should have only limited dust. A DC and an ambient filter should give you a lot of improvement. Clearly not enuf.

I've got an Trend facemask, and love it! Wonderful invention, simple, and yet really effective. My friend was busy burning up a Dremel tool when he was working with me (it was smokin) and I didn't even smell it until I took off the mask.

Where is your dust coming from? From most machines, a good connection to a DC should get most of it. Is your DC working properly with enuf pressure drop and volume to collect the dust at the source? And, with a lathe, it seems to be impossible to catch all the dust that it generates.

It's a lot easier to trap the dust at it's source than try to deal with all the air in the shop. If you exhaust all the dusty air from your shop, you will be exhausting all your shop heat/cooling and you will be working at outside temperatures. A good ventilation system should completely exhaust the volume of your shop about 6 or seven times an hour, IIRC.

24 x 32 x 8 x 7/60 equals 760 cfm of air to move, plus allowances for fan efficiency and static pressure when you are sizing the fan.

My shop is 12 x 24, and I find that very little dust from my lathe at one end travels to my bench at the other. Would you be ahead to separate the dusty parts with a partition (or just a curtain) and exhaust the he!! out of that area, and not worry about the rest? At least you'd need a smaller exhaust fan. If you put the dust producing area under negative pressure, you'd keep the dust from flowing to the rest of the shop.

Sorry didn't answer your questions directly, but that's as much as I know. There have to be smarter people than me out there.

OIld Guy

I didn't post when I first read your question, but I too thought if you were working in your shop during cooler/hotter temps you'd be loosing all of your heat/cool air. If you live in a humid area (as I do in KY), you'd also be increasing your humidity in you shop. I've a concrete floor and I've had reason to vent my garage before (to remove some potetially bad fumes) and my floor began sweating pretty heavily (not to mention some of the humidity that settled on my tools). I think you'd be much better off building a means of returning your clean air back to your shop. Grandad built a DC that pulled all his dust/chips outside the shop and then returned the cleaned air back to the shop. He lost a small amount of heat during the winter since the air was being moved outside, but not to the extent that he was pulling huge amounts of cold air into the shop. The heat loss or cool air loss might not be a big concern to you, but the humidity (if it exists) should be.

Just my thoughts, JD

I'm not worried about the heat loss but I am my health because after I work in the shop I cough and blow junk out of my nose for hours. The dust problem is better than it used to be after I went to a cyclone collector and ceiling filter unit. I'm not really worried about the heat loss. Most of the dust I generate is from the lathe which I has a

8 inch dust hose to. I do a fair amount of woodturning and just sweep up the shavings. Mt table saw and stationary belt sander contributes to the dust problem and I have 4 inch collection hoses to them. So, I'm down to thinking about exhausting everything I can outside and collecting it there. Thanks for the suggestions

Rob

Rob -- it is much easier to filter the small amount of air you breathe than to filter the whole shop. Instead of trying to make the shop perfect, make it "OK" and then use a powered respirator with a HEPA filter - you will be astounded at the improvement. I use a 3M product that is basically a hard hat with the filter and a face shield - it's expensive but I really like it. When I'm not making much dust, I just open the door and let a fan blow the air outside - I found a huge difference in the dust in my sinuses when I started using the powered respirator (specifically an Airmate, they cost about $600) and the cost of even the best respirator is far cheaper than a full high grade dust collection system.

If you go this way, the DC keeps things reasonably clean, the respirator protects you, and you periodically go around and vacuum up the dust that has settled on your stuff -

** Posted from **

Something you might consider:

I have the Jet air filter on the ceiling and was going to add an exhaust fan in the upper wall, both for dust and to get the hot air out of the ceiling area in summer.. I moved the filter to against the wall and am working on a vent to the outside (block walls are a bitch) and am going to remove the inside filter from the unit and just let it vent to the outside..

I use AC in the shop during the summer, but I'm thinking that venting the warmer air off the ceiling (9' ceilings) will help the AC cool the shop...

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

I am in agreement with what Bill Noble said, "it's much easier to filter the small amount you breath".

Not only that, but with any other way you would be breathing the dust you are making, while you are working, until all the dust is removed (never) from your shop.

Than there's that other thing, makeup air, as you are removing a lot of air, where is the new air coming from ?, I can see potential big problems, with the low-pressure created in the shop, if part of the house, then water heater, furnace, fire-place etc, are going to have a reverse airflow to let the air in, you know what that means !!!!, and if it's a really tightly constructed shop, implosion is not unthinkable, though rarely are shops that well sealed, but ??. Cross ventilation with open doors works well when climate is right for it, filtering your own breathing air seems a much easier way to go.

Have fun and take care Leo Van Der Loo

1: First, look at whether you have opportunity for natural cross ventilation... If you have a window on one side of the shop and a door or another window on the other side, just opening both should provide some sort of cross air flow that will help out a lot (assuming you don't have things locked up tight due to heating or cooling considerations).

If you have a decent dust extractor you shouldn't have much dust hanging around, even while you are power sanding on the lathe. (I do a fair bit of turning on a lathe with 42" swing and can generate a LOT of dust, but rarely have to deal with breathing much of it.) The volume of your shop is only 6144 cubic feet, and even a 1000 cu ft/minute dust extractor would (theoretically) change all of the air every six minutes or so... My current shop is similar in size, but doesn't have a lowered ceiling, so the volume is about 13000 cubic feet. With reasonable air flow, I don't have much issue with dust, except for the workbench, which is directly under the "exhaust path", so to speak.

If you don't have any built-in cross ventilation (like decent, consistent wind on one side of the shop and some windows or doors to make it work), then just about any sort of air mover will help. Here bigger is better, and slow moving fans are just quieter. With no close neighbors, if your spouse doesn't mind you could use just about anything. At one place I lived in San Jose, CA I picked up a ton of those square muffin fans used in the computer industry for a pittance, and just bolted them to metal strapping to fill an old screen door frame. It sounded like a jet plane getting ready to take off, but moved somewhere between 8000 and 10000 cubic feet of air a minute. You could even feel the breeze standing in one of the two open garage doors (no matter if the wind was blowing towards the garage, the air still moved out... One neighbor just about had a heart attack because he though I had a jet engine in the garage and was worried it would get loose and destroy the neighborhood. We made a deal. He'd turn his stereo off by

10PM and I'd turn off my fans... A while later I found a bunch of similar fans that were much quieter and he didn't even know I had them on. They only moved around 3 or 4000 cubic feet a minute, but still kept the garage pretty dust free. There was a fair bit of dust on the driveway, but some judicious re-aiming of the sprinklers made it all go away every morning when the lawn got watered... At another time, when I was doing some custom paint on classic cars, I filled one garage door with furnace filters to catch most of the paint and sprayed away inside. Nearly nothing on the driveway for the sprinklers to deal with and using the quiet fans so I wasn't spraying in a hurricane, things worked out fine. Of course, with all of the current EPA regulations on volatile organic vapors, you couldn't get away with that now (and can't even buy the lacquer any more...), but that was another time and place. 2: You can't do without the collection bin at the bottom of the cyclone, but you can probably do without the exhaust filters, especially if you exhaust to the outdoors. If you do exhaust outdoors, make sure you have a low-restriction source of "make up" air, such as a window or door near your lathe. That way, clean air comes in from outside and is blown out by your dust extractor/Cyclone. If you've got a working cyclone, you should have any visible dust and certainly no chunks coming out. This should all be going into the collection bin.

At my last shop, I had a cheap 1000 cu ft/min DE attached to a homemade cyclone (55 gallon drum with typical home-made cyclone style input and output out the top, with the DE sucking the output of the cyclone. The output of the DE was so clean that I ran without filter at all, and after 6 months barely had a light dust inside the (leaky) shed where the DE exhausted (outside of the shop)... Removing the filter bag also made a positive difference in the overall performance of the DE/Cyclone combination, as the factory filter bag cut off a fair amount of the airflow...

In my current shop, I haven't had the cash to purchase a new DE or Cyclone to install yet, (which makes running a 15" belt sander noisy as my only dust sucker is a shop vac that barely keeps up with the volume of the wide belt)... However, other items, and particularly my Lathe that does generate significant dust while sanding, aren't a real problem because I have great cross ventilation. Air comes in a garage door near the lathe and out through one man sized door at one corner of the shop, (same side). I stand in a relative bubble of clear air, but my poor bench catches a ton of dust if I leave much out on it to disturb the airflow. The other side of the shop gets a bit of dusting now and then, but once a month or so a quick dust-off with an air hose and everything is all right for awhile.

There are a lot of possible solutions, particularly if you haven't got any close neighbors. The most important is protecting your health. If you're using the airshield, you shouldn't have any problems with your lungs, and nearly anything else you do will help reduce the amount of dust in the environment, which will only make the job of the airshield easier.

Not mentioned yet is the potential for an explosive atmosphere under the right conditions... If you've got an exposed flame of any kind (water heater or furnace pilot, furnace burner, etc.) you've got to make sure you don't get too high a concentration of dust in the air, as it can be explosive under the right conditions. (Ever wonder why a flour mill has one side almost all windows? Let's just say it keeps the rest of the building intact if they hit that magic concentration of flour dust with an ignition source present...) I know it's difficult to get to that level in the average shop, but stranger things have happened.

I think you're basically on the right track, or you wouldn't have purchased the airshield... Keep up the good work, and take care turning!

--Rick

Thanks for the information. I didn't know that my cyclone had to have a dust collection bin as my thought was to do away with it and duct the dust collected outside by running a discharge hose out through the outside wall. Glad you told me that I need the bin. I would have hate to cut a hole in the wall for nothing. My workshop is a detached garage so I plan on opening at least one garage door and the entry door, but in winter I hope to use an exhaust fan attached on the inside of a window, so I can open and close it when I want. I think I'll start out with about a household-type 12 inch fan for an exhaust fan and see how that works and then move up to a larger one if I need to.

Rob

The window fan is a reasonable solution, but a 12" is unlikely to produce much effect. Watch the sales, there are times you can get a plastic housed 20" box fan for under $25 that puts out a fair bit of wind... One of these in a window (or three stacked in a doorway) will go a long way towards getting dust somewhere else...

--Rick