Homemade blastgates (looking for ideas)

[Wes Billups]

I'm sure there are many posts out there on this but my searches have come up empty.

I'm in the process of running 6" PVC around my shop and am looking for alternatives to using 15+ wye's. I thought I'd seen a plan or pictures on here a year ago where someone built a plywood box that contained 2-3 blast gates. This is exactly what I could use at multiple locations as I've got three spots where I'm dropping a single line down from the main trunk. Each of these drops will need to service 3 pieces of equipment. I'd much prefer to do something that's an integral wye and blast gate than purchase this many wye's. Another negative to all these wye's is they take up a tremendous amount of space.

Ideally the solution would be something like this but with a blast gate on the 3 ends.
246786

Please post pictures or links if you've got them. If the above item is available in a 6" version I'll consider getting them unless they're extremely expensive.

Thanks,
Wes

[Jamie Buxton]

I built something like I think you're asking for. It is at the shop, so pics will have to wait. A standard blast gate has a blade with a hole in it. You slide the blade one way or another to let suck go through or not. My gate/switch is built so that the hole in the blade opens one input line in one position, and slides to open the other line in the other blade position. You could do the same, with three blade positions, so you'd get to choose one of three inputs to the gate/switch.

[Jamie Buxton]

Here's two pics of my gate/switch. I've removed one input duct so you can see inside. The other input duct is up to the right. The output duct goes out the back, toward the cyclone behind. In one pic, the blade is in the down position. You can see the hole in the blade, and see through the hole to the output duct. In the other pic, the blade has slid up, so the hole in the blade is in front of the other input duct.

For scale, the ducting is 6" diameter.

[Jim O'Dell]

The bad thing about a box is what it does to your air flow by adding resistance to the run. How many tools are you running the system to? Jim.

[Jamie Buxton]

The bad thing about a box is what it does to your air flow by adding resistance to the run. How many tools are you running the system to? Jim.

The switch may look like a box, but another way to look at it is that it is two standard blast gates hooked together so when one is open the other is closed, and vice versa. The air from either input just flows through a 6"-diameter tube.

[John Lifer]

Page 14 of issue 229 of Fine Woodworking shows drawing of a manifold. hose from the DC slides down the manifold to cover the outlet hose coming from one of several machines. No real loss as with a box. Pretty nifty from my point of view.

[Robert Payne]

You might also want to check out Issue 55 of ShopNotes (January 2001), which had an article on dust collection that included a manifold with three built-in shop-made blast gates. It also had a chip separator that I built to separate chips from my planer before the dust went on to my (then) small single stage dust collector. I never made the manifold box with multiple blast gates, but I made plent of individual gates.

[Cyrus Brewster 7]

Ideally the solution would be something like this but with a blast gate on the 3 ends.
246786

Please post pictures or links if you've got them. If the above item is available in a 6" version I'll consider getting them unless they're extremely expensive.

Thanks,
Wes

Wes,

I am not sure about purchasing the above 'one into three' in 6" diameter, but I know of several people who have made one with by cutting two wye's in half and gluing the "wye" portions together. I have not done it myself but their systems work great with it. However, this may not line up with your budget because you will need two wye's for every drop.

[Mark Duksta]

I had a three-way wye in my last shop with blast gates on each leg. I'm not doing that again (new shop in January). I found that some dust fell into the ducts that were not being used. Next time I'm going with a straight length with three branches.