ABS pipe and fittings for dust collection in a woodworking shop

A story of gazintas and gazoutas

First, a discussion of safety

One can search the internet, read books, magazine articles, talk to friends, etc. and get endless opinions on what is the best material for piping in dust collection systems. I use 6" spiral wound pipe for the main arteries, and mostly 4" ABS pipe for everything else. One can find warnings about dust explosions from using non-grounded pipe and fittings everywhere.

Others only use a shop vac and the plastic flex line that comes with it. And guess what? No explosions from dust reported (I challenge the reader to find one!)

What's the truth here? I figure for large industrial installations, where you CAN search the internet and find some examples, this is not only a good idea, but it's the law. More likely to happen is you walk by some pipe in your dust collection system on a dry day, and your hair starts to stand on end from the static electricity buildup. Sometimes you'll get a small spark from it as your body acts as antenna path to ground.

At any rate, I believe that one can use non-conductive tubing safely if you take the proper precautions.

Now the meat of the story

Just about any decent engineering organization has some curmudgeon who, if you build up the courage to ask, will tell you just about anything you need to know about engineering in a common sense manner. Earl was the guy who broke me in at my first real job. I learned from Earl that most everything is gazintas and gazoutas. For example, the plug on the end of your lamp cord is a gazinta, as in the electricity gazinta the plug. It gazouta the wall outlet. Anyone spending time at the hardware store trying to figure out what fittings are required to hook up two dissimilar fittings will understand why plumbers are paid so much. Besides having to contort their bodies into odd positions, they have to know all their gazintas and gazoutas.

I had you read that story so you'll be ready to appreciate the information I'm about to hand over to you.

As I stated, I've got some 6" spiral wound pipe for the main trunk of my dust collection system. The stuff's expensive, and if I plumbed the rest of my shop with high quality metal tubing I'd have to spend a fortune. I also like to use 4" spiral flex hose for the final connection to my tools, since most are portable, and hard connections just aren't practical.   Looking for a good alternative to metal tubing that I could use for secondary lines, and would also fit my flex hose, I started to spend some time in the bulk tubing aisle at the BORG. Here's what I found:

From left to right, 4" spiral flex hose, 3" ABS union adapter, 3" ABS pipe. 3" ABS pipe wall thickness is 1/4". The union wall thickness is 1/4". If you imagine cutting through the union and pipe together, then looking on end, there are four 1/4" wall thicknesses, which add up to 1". 3"ID +1" total wall thicknesses = 4" ID of the flex hose.

ABS is easy to cut, it's not too heavy, the walls are fairly thick making the tubing fairly stiff, it's relatively cheap, you can get most any fitting you need, the fit is snug so in many cases you won't lose much suction if you don't glue them together, it's tough stuff, and I can easily adapt it to my trunk line.