Workin' wood

[greatbear]

The rainy weekend gave me a chance to work more towards reclaiming my basement workshop from neglect in preparation for doing some rather serious woodwork that's part of the renovations here at Casa De Mayhem. I had been making slow progress for a while now, but I was often hampered by cleaning up sawdust and subsequently sneezing my arse off and generally feeling miserable until I had some fresh air. While sawdust has always made me sneeze, it's gotten much worse since I got older, and I am fed up with the workshop sawdust migrating all over the basement and even upstairs. A fairly recent development in workshop tech has been simple and effective self-contained air filtration units for clearing sawdust from the air. Since my favorite woodworker's supply shop Skarie (more on this place and what it means to me in a future post) had emptied itself of practically everything to take it to some big Virginia woodworking show, I opted to go to Woodcraft instead. Twice, as it turned out.

I picked up a Jet Tools air filtration system to help clear the air, and a Jet dust collection system to corral the sawdust as I create it. Turns out the store was having a sale on Jet equipment at the time. Bonus! The table saw, jointer, sanding machine and especially the lathe and planer make bucketloads of chips and dust. This finds itself all over the basement and tracked upstairs through the kitchen and living room. No more. Once I am done rearranging the machinery and setting stuff up, I will put in some ductwork to connect the worst offenders simultaneously and permanently to the dust collector. This has been a long time coming.

I installed the air filtration unit this afternoon, hanging it from the trusses downstairs.After it was all in and running, I decided to give it a test by blowing the dust out of the table saw and jointer with compressed air. This is an effective means of cleaning, but always made a sneezeworthy fog of sawdust that would linger in the air and setting on the few things that might be clean. Not this time. The dust I kicked up disappeared from the air and into the unit in no time, and I was free from the hacking and sneezing that usually accompanies this sort of thing (and has kept me from doing it regularly, if at all). This makes for very happy me. The dust collector, in true Manic Mechanic fashion, sits partially assembled in the living room. It will get to it's home soon enough.

As I alluded to earlier, there is a couple reasons why I stopped doing woodworking as a pastime, and this will merit it's own (lengthy, >140 character) post. This is part of of me finally coming to terms with with some incredible loss in my past, and finally making strides to becoming the old me once again. I hope to keep up with this progress.

Comments

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

You and tools. I need to get a new cordless drill. I had a cheapie I bought at Big Lots several years ago and the charger unit's plug for the wallwart broke recently and I can't charge my batteries which were never the best at holding a charge and the damned thing was 18V too and didn't quite have the torque of a decent drill.

That's on my to get list this year.

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

There's a new one out that runs off a supercapacitor - 30 minutes run time... 90 seconds recharge time!

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Wow, I bet it's $$$$ in cost though.

[redmoonriver.livejournal.com]

*HUGS* Yay for recovering the old you! :)

[thetarnishedowl.livejournal.com]

I hope you'll post photos of your woodworking projects.

[budmassey.livejournal.com]

Good for you for reclaiming who you are. I can relate to that experience.

[restoman.livejournal.com]

I need one of those dust collection systems, and a filtration system would be very helpful too. Of course, first I need some spare money to work with. I am very glad that my workshop is in its own freestanding building, but opening the door and windows just doesn't work well enough to clean the air, and is impracticle in winter.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

My biggest problem is that the workshop is in the quarter of the basement that has absolutely no ventilation, windows or anything similar, it's pure dead space. I am going to add a vent fan of sorts to help move some air out of the area, but I am very limited as to what I can install because of how the house is designed. The workshop area is basically completely underground except for just above the sillplate. I can put a couple 4x10 dampered side vents and a pair of high velocity room vent fans (which are basically big, bathroom fan-style fans with double squirrel cage blowers in each box) similar to the one I added in the sunroom a few years back.

I am surprised how well the air filtration setup works. The one I have is about mid-sides in the lineup of units, there are smaller and larger ones available. This one seems to be more than enough for my use.