Cable Operated Blast Door Needs No Power

February 17, 2020 by Danie Conradie 34 Comments

Every well-equipped wood shop has a dust collection system, with blast gates at every tool to direct the suction power where you need it. If these gates are hard to reach they can be real pain to operate. [Cosmas Bauer] had this problem with his table saw, and created a convenient cable-operated mechanism.

The dust chute on table saw is on the back end, meaning he needs to walk around it to open it, and then walk back to the front to operate the machine. As we all know, ~~laziness~~ increased efficiency can be an excellent reason for projects. Electronics or pneumatics might get the job done, but [Cosmas] realised that a mechanical system might be simpler and more reliable. Being a woodworker, he built most of the system out of wood.

The blast door itself is held in the closed position by a piece of elastic tubing. To pull it open, he attached a bicycle cable to the blast door, with the other side attached to a latching mechanism that is the star of the show. It’s a rotating disc, with the end of the cable and operating handle attached on the outer edge. A slot track is cut in the disc, in which a pin on the end of a short arm slides. It has a few sharp corners in the track, which forces the pin to only go around in one direction, and to latch in two possible positions when released. Check out the video after the break to see it in action.

Continue reading “Cable Operated Blast Door Needs No Power” →

Automatic Dust Collection For The Whole Shop

January 5, 2018 by Tom Nardi 19 Comments

If you’ve got a woodworking area, or even if you’ve just got something that really churns out dust like a belt sander or table saw, there’s an excellent chance you hate sawdust with a passion. It gets all over your clothes, jams up everything mechanical, and as a fun little bonus can be explosive if not handled properly. Thankfully newer tools tend to come with their own dust collection bags (back in the old days, you weren’t really a man unless you were coughing up wood fibers), but if you’ve got a half a dozen tools with half a dozen different dust bags you’ve got to empty, that can get pretty annoying.

Especially if you take woodworking as seriously as [Brad Wright] does. Over on his YouTube channel [DIY Builds], he quickly runs through the construction of a whole-shop dust collection system with some very neat features. Not everyone needs a system this intricate, but the tips and tricks he shows off during the build are great and can certainly be adapted to less grandiose setups.

Dust collection connector with closeable gate — One of the scratch-built gates.

[Brad] goes into a bit more detail in this gallery, revealing that the heart of the build is a Harbor Freight dust collection system that he modified into a cyclone separator. Big chunks fall down into the 55 gallon bucket, and what’s left gets blown out of the shop via a louvered vent through an exterior wall. An intricate system of 4 inch PVC pipe is then used to connect up each individual machine’s dust collection port. Even individual hand sanders get into the act via a three way manifold. His table saw lacked a dust port, so he enclosed the motor with a piece of plywood and made his own.

One of the most interesting aspects of the build is the scratch-built blast gates. These are essentially valves which open and close the different sections of the PVC where they mate to the individual stations. This prevents the dust collection system from wasting suction by trying to pull from all the stations at once when only one is in use at any given time. [Brad] even wired up the blast gates with switches that will turn the dust collection system on when the gate is open, and off when it’s closed.

This isn’t the first time we’ve covered the lengths people will go to rid their shop of dust. Cyclone dust separators are an especially popular build, using everything from sheet metal to 3D printed parts.

Continue reading “Automatic Dust Collection For The Whole Shop” →

The Internet Of Blast Gates

December 11, 2017 by Brian Benchoff 22 Comments

There’s nothing quite like building out a shop filled with tools, but even that enviable task has a lot of boring work that goes into it. You’ve got to run power, you’ve got to build benches, and you need to build a dust collection system. That last one is usually just fitting a bunch of pipe and tubes together and adding in a few blast gates to direct the sucking of your dust collection system to various tools around the shop.

For most shops with a handful of tools and dust collection ports, manually opening and closing each blast gate is an annoying if necessary task. What if all of this was automated, though? That’s what [Bob] over on I Like To Make Stuff did. He automated his dust collection system. When a tool turns on, so does the vacuum, and the right blast gate opens up automatically.

The first part of this build is exactly what you would expect for installing a dust collection system in a shop. The main line is PVC sewer pipe tied to the rafters. Yes, this pipe is grounded, and s otherwise not very interesting at all. The real fun comes with the bits of electronics. [Bob] modified standard blast gates to be servo-actuated. Each individual tool was wired up to a current sensor at the plug, and all of this was connected to an Arduino. With a big ‘ol relay attached to the dust collection system, the only thing standing in the way of complete automation was a bit of code.

This project is a continuation of [Bob]’s earlier Arduinofication of his dust collection system where all the blast gates were controlled by servos, an Arduino, and a numeric keypad. That’s an exceptionally functional system that gets around the whole ‘leaning over a machine to open a gate’ problem, but it’s still not idiot-proof – someone has to press a button to open a gate. This new system is, for the most part, completely automatic and doesn’t really require any thought on the part of the operator. It’s neat stuff, and a great application of cheap Arduinos to make shop life a bit easier.

Continue reading “The Internet Of Blast Gates” →