

Keep your Lungs Healthy.

If you are involved in woodworking by now you know that every woodworking workshop no matter how small it is needs a dust collector.

Many say that the heart of a woodshop is the table saw, others say, it's their router table, band saw, planer... and so on.

Which ever it is, one thing is for sure, the lungs of every woodshop is the dust collector.

When you making chips most of them are heavy enough to fall on the floor, but when you have wood dust or other sort of it, that will fly in the air you breathe. These fine particles of wood can easily find their way into your lungs and are a serious health hazard.

Now there are many ways to protect your self like wearing a good dust mask (they don't come cheep but are good) or the inexpensive throw-away paper filters air respirators (not a very safe way to go, but is better than nothing).

Then you can have an air filter which is mounted on the ceiling to purify the shops air (the dust must first pass from your face before it reaches them, so these are good for after work), and finally you have the dust extractor systems which can be complex or simple (if you can afford one they are very good up to a point).

Regardless how good your dust extraction may be, there is still ambient dust that escapes from it, especially if you are sanding or routing you need something which is easy to use, portable, and powerful to suck the dust from your tools. Here is where a shop vacuum comes in handy.

The problem with shop vacuums is that if you connect them direct onto the tool it will suffer from dust clogging within 10 minutes, and also is not that easy to empty it so often, even if you push it to collect more it could burn out.

An alternative to this is to have an intermediate system between your tool and the vacuum, and this is the cyclone dust collector bucket.

The cyclone dust collector bucket will collect 99% of the dust and throw it into the bucket below, leaving your vacuum almost dust free and clean.

My cyclone dust collector bucket is very inexpensive and efficient. It only cost me under 20 euros (about 25 U.S. dollars), easy to build in a weekend, so here is how I build it.