Unexpected sawdust creation

[Tom Brouillette]

My better half is away for a few days, so I processed a BUNCH of wood this weekend. I'm trying to knock down the stack of wood I've gathered up over the last several months. In doing so, I used my bandsaw nearly nonstop on a variety of species (cedar, cottonwood, red maple, magnolia, etc). My bandsaw exhaust port is next to a plantation-shuttered window in my garage. The louvers directed the sawdust into some interesting stratifications that I didn't notice until after I was done. I took a pic before I cleaned up my mess (before Mrs. Clean gets home).

My DC is on the opposite wall of my shop, over the lathe. 343975

[Bob Bouis]

Guess I'm not the only one suffering from poor bandsaw dust collection.

[Jeffrey J Smith]

Tom - Mine did the same thing - until I hooked the DC duct to it. Just got a longer length of 4" hose that reaches both. Since I never use them both at the same time, it's quick to move the hose from one to the other. Even then, some dust escaped. I ran a wye (4" out to 4" and 2-1/2" in) from the 4"hose at the dust port and connected a 2-1/2" hose that runs under the table right next to the blade. It now gets most everything.

I'm curious - is that a DC above your lathe, or an ambient air filter unit? The ambient air filters aren't meant to get the heavier dust particles that most equipment throws out - just the particles that wind up suspended in the air. They're good to have together with a DC unit that picks up the heavy stuff. Forgive me if I misunderstood...

[Tom Brouillette]

The DC is along the back wall, not on it. It is a standard HF model with the Wynn hi efficiency filter. It works great, but it's about 14 ft from the bandsaw.

[Jeffrey J Smith]

I've got the same setup - 2hp HF DC - it's a good collector made much better with the Wynn filter cannister. Mine's not that far from the bandsaw, but not that far off - about 10' or so. I put a cyclone lid on a trash can coming out of the DC, and after that there are two blast gates installed. One goes to the lathe, the other to a longer hose that I can switch between the bandsaw, the table saw, the planer and jointer. Worked great in the old shop (a garage) even though moving it from machine to machine was a bit of a pain. The new shop has room in the crawlspace for the DC and the compressor (glad to have the two biggest noisemakers out of my way) - just have to pipe everything under the floor where it's needed.

[Bob Bouis]

Here's mine. Unfortunately the dust collector was hooked up!

343993

[Stan Calow]

People make art using layers of colored sand like this. Could be a new art form.

[Ron Stadler]

People make art using layers of colored sand like this. Could be a new art form.

Yep thats what I was thinking, pretty cool stuff there.