Bad Science in Latest Wood Magazine

[Dave Kennedy]

Thanks, Lee & Alan! I have both aluminum tape and 100% silicone caulk (leftover from assembling my ClearVue 1800). Sounds like sealing and tightening is a good task to do when everything is in place. Today/tonight's plan is to start on some blast-gates. After battling getting flex hose over the PVC trying various heat gun, soap & water, and clipping flex hose wire methods, I'm planning to go with Alan's approach of female connectors for end points (from the DC and into machine ports) and with male connections on the flex hose. That's a nice standard solution for a single shop and makes sense to me.

If I decide to make my own PVC "bell" creation plug, did you just glue up several pieces of MDF to get the 6" MDF blank for turning, Alan?

[Lee Schierer]

You can make a slightly smaller diameter adapter by sawing a kerf along the length of a short piece of your pvc pipe and inserting it inside any piece of pvc pipe. The O.D. of this piece will match the I.D. of your duct pipe.

[Bart Leetch]

I have about 50 feet of 4" pvc in my shop for my DC system. When it was first installed there was considerable static charge inside and outside the pipe. Initially I would get a mild shock if I tried to touch the pipes. Getting your arm near the pipes would raise all the hairs on your arm toward the pipe. After a few months (I don't use my shop every day) of running dust through the pipe the static charge disappeared. If I go out to the shop now there is no charge inside or outside the pipe and none gets generated even when running the planer or belt sander for long periods of time. There are no grounding wires inside or outside of my duct work. The hairs on your arms don't even wiggle if you get your arm near the pipe.

My shop did exactly the same thing...been saying this forever .

[Eric Keller]

I don't understand what the mechanism would be for the static buildup to go away over time.

I always doubted the effectiveness of static discharge probes on aircraft. And I know more than one person that had a nasty run-in with the static dischargers on a plane. You have to be careful walking around an air show. But they put them on just about everything. Last time I looked out the window of an airliner, there they were.