How Your Dust Collector Works (2012)
I got into woodworking at university when I padded out a semester with an art class. I actually brought my already perilously low CompSci GPA down even further with a D+ for my final grade. The professor didn&#x27;t want an outsider in the class and they let me know in the hallway, discreetly. I reminded them I was paying full tuition and it was my entitlement - ha, how that would end up going.<p>12 years later I have my own little woodshop. But learning how to enjoy it has been a multi-year journey.<p>Everything from here on is just my opinion. I believe that in general, some people are more allergic to wood dust than other people.  Some people seem to breathe in pine dust all year long and are fine. If I sniff a single crosscut of pine, I&#x27;ll get stuffy and snotty for 3 days and I won&#x27;t write code very well afterwards. So this has bit into my hobby, since I labor as someone who tries to write code.<p>I have a 2-stage cyclone dust collector. I won&#x27;t shame any brands, but the popular model I have has a serous design defect and due to its short height, it doesn&#x27;t reliably separate the dust from the air. I have played with it and found that adding a third stage, a passive cyclone from another vendor, catches almost all of the dust, maybe more than 99% of it. This effectively turned my 2-stage into a glorified blower, but I call it the &quot;corrective lens of my personal Hubble&quot;.<p>Dust collection is about grabbing your dirty air before it pollutes your shop. Collecting chips (large pieces of wood) is nice, but the larger value is the dust - stuff that floats in the air for more than a few seconds (maybe upwards of a week). I was positive I could detect how dusty the air is with my super-bright LED lights, but this is false: after getting a few tools to measure the air, what I was sure was perfectly clean air, was still rife with dust. My LED test was invalid.<p>I have a 400 CFM air filter. A box hanging from chains that cleans the air. A little actual math revealed that I needed more like five of these units; I got them, and with the proper sizing, they actually work very well. These suck up all the dust that escapes the dust collector. I have read that they work better with time, forming cobwebs that increase the &#x27;grabbiness&#x27; of the filter.<p>Inversely, the dust collector, which has a large cylinder shaped filter about the size of a person, needs to be pristinely clean to operate correctly. Once I cleaned mine for the first time, I more than doubled the suction at each connection.  I ran my own HVAC network using cheap box store fittings, and so far it works fine. If I had more than a couple horsepower, it would collapse these cheap parts if I ever forget to leave a single connection open. I can say for sure that the 40 feet of pipe I have run has far too many leaks to collapse during a port mishap.<p>I learned about the Dylos air quality meters from the channel Mattias Wandel runs, along with many other ideas. With a device for measuring the air quality, a dust collector, air cleaners, and the ultimate luxury, a 3M PAPR (self contained air filtering with a helmet and a little belt pack), I have finally found one strategy for enjoying this hobby of mine. I will admit that figuring this out has been a huge part of the fun: hacking at how to keep my lungs and brain happier while turning wood into sawdust. I can&#x27;t qualify beyond what I feel, that I feel fine, but that&#x27;s good enough for me.