dustcollection

First rule of dust collection: Collect the dust at its source. Lathes produce a lot of shavings too so the dust collector shown here is NOT designed to collect shavings. There is a screen to prevent shavings from entering the system. (Even my commercial dust collector gets bogged down by turning shavings. They are so long that they hang up on the impellor so I have had to install a cyclone garbage can before the collector. I use both so as to create as much suction as possible.)

Here is the dust collector that I made using a furnace fan and a plastic bucket turbine. A furnace fan extracts remaining dust after the turbine separates the majority of the dust.

(In order to move more air a fan driven by a 1/8hp sewing machine motor was added later).

The photo above shows the fan under the collector hood. This fan is powered by a sewing machine motor and is controlled by a light dimmer switch, as a result the fan can be cranked up during maximum dust production (noisy) or turned down to just keep collecting ambient dust.

Here is the fan hood that was added to the system after I tried it for a bit and found that the furnace filter with 1/4HP motor was not drawing enough air to be effective for collecting the dust from the lathe.

What would I do differently?

-Improve the impeller system to improve the cyclone.

-Put the small fan lower down so the air is pulled through where I originally designed it to be pulled in rather than adding the hood.

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I still have to use a Triton Powered Respirator even with two dust collectors. (When sanding only)

By the way the Triton powered ventilator hood requires a fix to its hose to make it practical. (Click on "fix" above if you have had problems with your respirator and see what my solution was)