Safety confession

[Philip Duffy]

Warning!! I have been using a plastic vent hose that is normally connected to a clothes dryer for a pickup for my shop-vac. On occasion I have noticed a tiny jolt of static elec. near my lathe, and always found it a bit curious. Well, yesterday I used that same flex-hose on my new planner. Wow! Got a jolt I will not soon forget. The potential danger of this jolt came rushing home and that hose is now in the dump.
Please don't use flex-hose in similar applications Philip

[Joe Suelter]

It's not just the dryer hose...my factory shopvac hose will give off some juice as well. I've since grounded the new hose. Sparks and wood chips are a big problem. If you hurry over to Badger Pond today http://www.wwforum.com/cgi-bin/forum_main/ptools2.cgi you can do a search of the archives for the proper way to ground hoses. Good Luck!

[Jason Roehl]

What you'll eventually find in the BP archives is a link to a researcher who put the static discharge/dust explosion myth to rest. It would take an EXTREME static discharge under very specific conditions not at all likely to be found in a home shop to produce an explosion. Bottom line is, there's just not enough energy in a static discharge to ignite a weak concentration of dust moving at 3-4000fpm.

It's just dependent on the annoyance factor to you as to what you do about it.

Jason