Thanks to all who swiftly anwered my questions about ventilation and
setup, and with so much detail! What a great help you have been!
There is a lot more to think about than I realized, including
checking into my homeowner’s insurance policy requirements, and
certainly sucking carbon monoxide from the water heater or furnace,
as Dan mentioned, is something I never considered. Right now most of
the “polishing” I do consists of steel wool or foredom wire brushing
of liver of sulfer oxide from silver (which I still don’t want to
breathe), and I do have a large, stand-alone buffing machine with
filters I bought at an estate sale over ten years ago that I only
used a few times, but plan to use it more in the near future. I
never trusted its collection system, always felt it should be vented
outside, though venting a closed container as R.E. Rouke mentioned
sounds like a good option. More often, I think I’ll be using
polishing wheels on the foredom.
I misplaced my Complete Metalsmith at some point during my last
move, but I’ll be buying a new copy if I can’t turn it up. Elaine,
you jogged my memory - somewhere I think I do have a book about
building shop ventilation, and I’ll have to dig around for that as
well. My dad seems to know his stuff, and he likes to find solutions
to these types of problems, but I will show him all this information
and see if we need to come up with a different plan. No doubt there
are issues he didn’t consider, either. On top of it, I have all the
equipment for centrifugal casting, including a burnout kiln (from
the same estate sale), but have never set it up, partly because of
the ventilation issue. That’s a whole other ball of wax for me, I
figure I’ll start back with fabrication. Casting was never my forte,
anyway. Though now with all the discussions about PMC and having
never tried it, I might give that a go and could use the kiln for
PMC, at least.
I sure feel like I’m starting over, talk about rusty! I know this
forum will be an invaluable resource. Thanks again for the very
helpful replies.