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View Full Version : Cyclone to catch paint dust/chips.



Peter De Smidt
07-01-2006, 8:13 PM
Hi Folks,

So I'm finally getting around to painting my hundred year old house. I want to do a good job, and so I'm going to take off all of the old paint. (My neighbor didn't do this, and within two years, his paint job looked terrible.) I've built a quartz paint removing tool, similar to the Silent Paint Remover (R), and most of the paint comes off in good sized chips; but to get the wood smooth, I need to scrap it with a carbide scraper, and this makes some dust. When doing this, I wear a full-face 3m respirator, and I put down plastic sheets, and vacuum with a HEPA vac, but clearly this isn't an ideal way to handle all of the chips. As a result, I've been thinking--which can lead to trouble--that since I need chip/dust control for my smallish wood working shop, that getting a decent cyclone (Clear Vue or Oneida) might allow me to solve both problems.

With regards to paint scraping, I've considered using a longish 5" or so flexible hose to a flared rectantular fitting that I would place just below where I'm scrapping. I realize that there would be sigificant loss of suction power with, say, a 50 ft hose, but my guess is that either unit would still capture quite a bit of the dust, much more so that than the current fall on plastic sheeting/blow away in the breeze method/vacuum with HEPA vac method.

For the painting scheme, I'd probably have to mount the dust collector on a trailer, which I could move from one side of the house to the other. (It wouldn't be a problem running the required electrical connection out of the basement windows.)

Does this sound like a reasonable idea?

Vaughn McMillan
07-02-2006, 5:48 AM
Welcome to the Creek, Peter. I'm by no means an expert, but your idea seems workable, and it may indeed be a way to kill two birds with one stone. Does the scraping cause much ultra-fine dust (that stays suspended in the air), or is it mainly chips and small unsuspended particles? Someone with more DC knowledge than me could help you figure out if the long flex hose run would be a deal-killer.

- Vaughn

Frank Hagan
07-02-2006, 12:32 PM
You might be better off putting something together with a powerful shop vac. The DCs, in large enough sizes to pull enough air, would probably require a pretty large motor, which translates into more complexity in trying to get power to the unit as you move it around. I think a 50' flexible hose would be pretty restrictive to airflow for most of these units.

Shop vacs are made to pull a lot of air through a small hose, and a 2" hose from a shop vac would be much easier to move around. You'll have to figure out a way to position the collector nozzle ... we did a similar thing when we sanded our kitchen cabinets. A large shop vac nozzle held a foot away from the ROS really did pick up most of the fine stuff. For ultimate flexibility in postioning the shop vac nozzle, I utilized an intelligent mobile locating device (my wife).