When I first built my shop here in North Carolina (2005), I’d brought some things from my old shop in Tennessee to use here. Of those things was included my dust collection system, such as it was. Being it worked sufficiently in my old shop, I figured it would work ok in my new shop. I had a lot to learn over the years… and as my equipment and skills upgraded, so did the need to upgrade my dust collection system.
I had purchased a Shop Fox dust collector similar to the one shown below.
At the time the unit I bought was a two horsepower 220v capacitor start motor, and I ran two four inch lines through my shop, being the collector had two four inch inlets available. The bags I used to begin with were as shown in the picture above. This resulted in an outfit that looks like the one shown below, however it was still a Shop Fox collector, maybe you’d call it a hybrid collector made from different machines.
I ran that system for several years and always suffered from a lack of collection and not enough bag capacity. I found a friend that was not using bags, he had ability to push his chips outside onto his lot behind his shop. I looked at my available space and decided to do the same thing… no bags.. no carrying anything out. and certainly more flow, being the filter does restrict flow to a point ( it has to in order to filter out the dust).
Opening up the machine to the outside made flow about twice as effective… however I still lacked enough to be totally satisfied. I couldn’t afford actual dust collection grade ducting, so I decided to go with larger HVAC ducting again, however gambling on a 6 inch trunk instead of 4 inches the whole way.
I had a day that was slow in the shop… and decided to dedicate that day to renovating my system, and ended up putting in a whole new system, collector and all (after all, the old system was nearly 20 years old by now).
I purchased another Shop Fox collector, exactly the same specs as before from Amazon. It came in a damaged box… and I was worried that it was going to be a bust for putting it in… but opened the box and assembled as much of it as I needed anyway. I also tore out the existing ducting (which as old HVAC and cardboard tube)…. see the old stuff in the pictures below…
Oh, there was also schedule 40 drain pipe in there too… all that together makes for a problem with air flow… but it worked good enough at the beginning of my woodworking career. BUT…. Not now… So the upgrade was in order.
I said I used HVAC 6 inch ducting, but nothing other than that, and I sealed the ducting with a product that seems to glue and seal the ends.
The picture above shows the ceiling space that once had and the dust ‘leaks’ that the old ducting had. It wasn’t hard to take down… and you can see the other run of the old stuff along the wall just above the peg board on the wall. That was sufficient to catch dust from my radial arm saw, but I rarely use that so it wasn’t that important…and before you ask, I did that that down too and give it an upgrade.
The larger ducting is going in, and I know it’s not pretty, but it’s fairly straight in it’s runs, and large enough to be sufficient to serve as a trunk line.
Where the old system dropped to the majority of my tools, I made a change to that too, and created two drops, one to my planer that is 6 inches almost all the way to the tool.
Having sealed ducting and large diameter, the flow I experienced when I turned it on was astounding!! It makes my tools actually work as designed when connected to collection. Even my table saw has very little left over in the bottom where my collection connects, and it use to have to be cleaned out if the saw was used heavily, which it often is.
The next change was the new collector… being it is not a capacitor start, it starts much faster, and it so much quieter… I can hear the radio playing in the shop while the collector is running. I have my collector motor in a closet so it’s closed off from the shop except for some ventilation, so I use a remote start/stop system… and it’s almost instantly on, not the lag in start up that I had before.
The end of this upgrade came with a trial run… and every tool I tried performed twice as effectively as before, and I can now use two tools, maybe more, depending on demand, and still have the flow I need.