These last two days has been time spent on adding a vacuum system to the modular Workbench unit. Using rigid plastic pipes and right angled corners plus a Y junction, to provide two sockets to connect up flexible hose pipes to various equipment that are currently installed.
Vacuum-Starts-Here
and-Runs-under-bench-to-
Two-ports-near-the-machines
The two sockets have little sliding shutters to control the amount of vacuum suck for each line, or completely shutting one off if desired.
One thing we discovered was that the vacuum unit itself has a comb filter and even though it looked cleaned, when we air blasted it with high pressure compressed air, the sheer increase in suction power was amazing!! We must remember to air blast the filter now and again!! We are thinking of getting a Vortex Chamber to provide the 99% dust separator without the need for paper filters etc. We will order one which are quite cheap nowadays and experiment.
Each of the machine modules has had appropriate extraction hoses fitted which plug into the ports on the table.
Finally, a multi-jointed arm stretching from the middle fence was designed and built. It has a long rectangular box on the end of the arm to sit over the circular saw blade which is exposed so this modification will provide both a safety feature of covering up the dangerous spinning blade but also to suck up the flying sawdust off the blade too.
The-blade-covere-and-dust-extractor-arm-
The only little tricky bit was the joints on the arm as the wing nuts and bolts couldn’t be tightened hard enough to stop the arm drooping down under gravity and weight of the protection box. We now trying to fix this problem by using little squares of an old sanding belt, cutting them up and gluing them in pairs at each joint so the rough surface will hopefully clamp together and grip much more strongly this time to stop the droop!!