Getting Tough on Dust

Very few woodworkers do their best work while kicking through mountains of shavings and coughing out a cloud of dust. Once you have a dust collection system installed, it will do a lot of the shop clean-up for you - while you work, not afterward.

Being aggressive in cleaning dust from the air in your shop doesn't necessarily mean you have to spend a ton on new equipment.

Choosing a Dust Collector

To choose the right dust collector for your shop, you'll need to consider the air volume requirements of the tools in your shop and also the amount of static pressure your dust collector will have to overcome. To help explanation of dust collection design - including formulas for calculating air volume, velocity and static pressure losses - we recommend a dust collection book, where you'll find the detailed information you'll need to do the best job of designing your dust collection system.

There are, however, a few dust collection "rules of thumb" that are based on the size of your shop and the type of tools in it. Below well offer our picks for dust collection systems ranging from a small portable dust collection solution to a central system for a well equipped two car garage sized shop.

How Dust Collectors are Rated

Dust collectors are designed and rated to produce a sufficient air moving force to capture and move woodworking debris under certain conditions. Nearly all manufacturers publish ratings for individual dust collectors including:

• Air velocity in feet per minute (fpm)
• Air volume in cubic feet per minute (cfm)
• Maximum static pressure (sp)

A large, powerful dust collector will, of course, move more air with more friction-overcoming force than a small, portable unit, and therefore can be used to service machinery that produces greater volumes of debris and have greater cfm requirements. Also, because of their greater capacity for overcoming static pressure losses, more powerful dust collectors can be situated farther away from individual machines, making them more advantageous for central dust collection systems.

Affordable, Portable Systems

A portable dust collector is moved from machine to machine, keeping it in close proximity of the tool it's servicing and limiting the static pressure losses caused by long runs of ductwork.

There's a minimum amount of set-up involved - the dust collector connects to the dust collection port of the tool it's servicing with a short length of flexible hose and a keyed hose clamp.

Any of these Jet Dust collectors make an excellent choice for a small woodworking operation where an affordable solution is the goal.

Cleaning the Air

One of the best is the JET AFS-1000 Air Filtration System. This high-quality system features an electrostatic filter which removes 98% of all particles five microns in size. This technology also removes micro-particles of smokes, viruses, bacteria, and fine dust at the rate of 25 times more effectively than an ordinary home furnace filter. And it cleans and circulates the air in a 20 x 20 x 8 shop in under five minutes!

» Dust Collection Hose, Fittings and Accessories