Latest and greatest overhead dust collection - Page 1
Picture 1
Never heard of shark dust? That's because it just don't exist! I use MDF extensively in many of my projects. It's cheap, stable, hard, but it also makes lots of fine dust when you cut it. Even though my BT3000 table saw has excellent dust collection, MDF dust gets flung out the top. Let a good amount of this stuff settle in your lungs, and you could be in trouble down the road. Having sucked up way too much of the stuff, I decided to do something about it. I made a couple of attempts at overhead dust collection, all left me wanting. Then Lee Styron went and made the perfect guard/dust collector to go with his splitter. All I had to do was adapt the hose to my big boom to the 2" hose. I have a "doublewide" saw using extension rails. I don't move the rails around. For many, however, this isn't an option, so I worked up an alternative mounting system.
I really like to use ABS pipe in my workshop. It easily adapts to the flexible hose and 6" main line. With a minimum of work I adapted the ABS system to the 2" clear hose that works with the Shark Guard. The O.D. of 1-1/2" ABS pipe is around 1.9". Lee supplies a 2" O.D. 3" long polycarbonate coupling with all Shark Guards. If you ream out a 1-1/2" fitting, the coupling will fit into it. I used a 3" to 1-1/2" ABS Tee-Wye, as shown above.
Let's look at how my saw is set up. Notice that there's a stalk on the left, bolted directly to the table. The main structural component is a 4" ABS stalk. This thing is STIFF. The boom tube is 3" ABS. It's about 60" in length. I used a 3 1/2" hole saw on the 4" stalk, and the 3" section slides through it snugly. The friction fit is more than enough to hold it in place.
Picture 2 |
Looking from the back of my saw, you can see how the boom tube extends over the tablesaw surface. | 
Picture 3 |
This is the "business end", showing what fittings were used to connect up to the 2" flexible hose that extends down to the Shark Guard. |
Here's how I might accomplish the same result if I had an off-the-shelf BT3X00, and wanted to keep the ability to slide the rails back and forth. Note that I haven't fully assembled one of these on anything, just partially assembled some stuff for pictures. If you find any errors or have any suggestions, please contact the author at gugie@gugie.com