Ok since I’ve gotten so much great advice from the Orchid over the
years, I have decided to give a little something back. We basically
live in our studio and dust is a serious issue that was at one
time causing problems in our home, especially polishing dust. I
realized something had to be done when my cat turned pink from all
the rouge! The solution I have come up with has changed everything
and I thought I should share it.
I took a home HEPA (High Efficiency Air Filter, i think), one of the
larger ones, not a little desktop thing, and converted it to a dust
collector for benchtop use as well as for our polishing machine. The
way I did it was to get a cardboard box about the size of the intake
grill of the filter about 4-6" deep, and some 4" clothes dryer vent
type flexible plastic ducting long enough to go to my benchtop, and
some 6" same to go to the polishing machine. I cut out a 4" and a 6"
hole in the bottom of the box for the duct and used red vapor-barrier
tape to tape the ducting into the holes and seal it up well. Then I
taped the box over the front intake grill of the HEPA filter. I cut
the the sides on the top of the box to make a flap that can be opened
to filter the general room air, or closed to pull air through the
ducting. I routed the ducting to the polishing machine along the wall
under my bench and taped the end of it (again with vapor-barrier
tape, it’s expensive but it sticks to anything forever) over the
outtake fan grill on my polishing machine. Then I made myself a
benchtop dust collector out of the 4" ducting by taping a piece of
window screen over the end of it, and making a dust guard out of a
piece of clear acrylic, carefully heated with a propane torch to
conform to the curve of the duct at one end and the also tapedon. I
secure it to my benchpin with a piece of copper wire. With the HEPA
filter fan on it’s highest setting it pulls fairly well through the
4" duct, and the polishing machine has the added assit of a fan and
both ends of the system. In fact with a well sealed acrylic guard on
the front and sides of the machine I can now polish in a white
T-shirt for two hours and it’s not even pink afterwards. I know that
a “real” dust collector is extremely expensive but this cost me about
150 bucks, and it’s HEPA, so it filters out the extremely fine
particles that are bad for ones health. OK anyway I hope this made
sense and somebody gets some use out of the idea.
Happy dust free polishing to you all…
Douglas