Thread: Dust Collection

Originally Posted by John H

How is everyone collecting sawdust from their CNC routers?

I was having a bit of play with my CNC this weekend and stuff goes everywhere. I ended up holding the hose from my 4" dusty near the router to collect most of it.

You just answered your own question john thats how some of us do it at the moment, I normally have ear muffs on, Bob put together a good little Cyclone unit off his shop vac see link that works well.

Otherwise I think a dusty/cyclone + enclosure will be the way to go but the enclosure needs to be big enough for you to work around placing clamps etc.

I have made a couple of dust shoes the best was one that was made from one of those plastic containers that you get Chinese food in.

Ill see if I can find the photo as it worked really well.

So try and think of something simple and cheap half the time it works better in the long run and can easily be remade if it get broken.

I find a shop vac much easier to use hand held.
The vacuuming has been an ongoing problem for me. I have treid an enclosed chamber but there is just too much volume in an enclosure for even the best 4 inch dusty to work.
A sole plate on the spindle head wasn't successful for me but I was only using a shop vac on that design.
My latest is that I am going to build a machine standing on it's end and let gravity do the work with a collection tray at the bottom. It will be hinged so it can be rotated to horizontal for mounting jobs.
The design of the machine has a lot to do with how you contain the dust and swarf coming off. Try a couple of pieces of cardboard taped to either sdie of the X axis and fitting under the gantry. This will contain all sideways dust to the table top. That's a good start then look at where the dust is then going and design around it. A full enclosure will contain all the dust but don't expect to be able to vacuum the chamber - see earlier comment.

Rod, About 15 years ago on one of my trips to the US I saw a Large CNC unit cutting compressor turbines from Ti alloy. The swarf management was very interesting and it consisted of a combination of jets of compressed air (actually I think it was nitrogen) which blasted the swarf into one corner where what looked like a 4" dust port grabbed the Ti shavings and dumped them into a large metal bins for recycling.

It could be that you could setup compressed air jets to herd the shavings into a corner or collector area where the airspeed of a DC might be high enough to pick them up?

Thanks for the suggestion Bob. An issue with something like that is a screaming die grinder, dusty and air compressor all working together would probably shut me down with complaints from neighbors. Also I prefer to keep MDF and wood dust on the table rather than airborne. I have just about exhausted all avenues with this problem but always happy to hear a new idea.

What about something along the lines of what Wood Wizz has.

Thanks DJ
This is what a lot of the large commercial machines have running. The brush on the base has been very difficult to source.

The big boys use a pickuphead under the router head connected to a vac unit. it about
20- 30 mm deep with a four inch out let on it . the bigger the router bit or the bigger the
cut trough the better the dust pick up..

Ahh the bain of all our machines.

The first 100 hours I clocked with my cnc was in the shed and everytime I did the routing Id sit there with hand held vacuum cleaner trying to catch us much dust as I could, unfortunatley at the end of every job especially if it was mdf, Id spend another half an hour sweeping the floor.

I saw one of rods units fully enclosed in a cabinet, so I decided to give this a go, enclosed the whole unit under a bench and wolla away it goes, works pretty good, not much dust but that being said I found my ballscrews started clogging up and seizing, so next step was still enclosed but a set of brushes that wipe and clean the ballscrews as they go in and out of there respective nuts, since then Ive had no problems, I run the job let it make its mess, remove the item that Ive made and come back 10 minutes later when all the dust has settled in the cabinet, then simply roll the cnc workcentre out of the cabinets and vacuum all the mess up, since then no problems with dust control.

One of the guys that I know through CNCzone in the ACT made an MDF plate. This attached to the router and next to it, the dust collector pipe end. He then bought some bristles that are used on semi-trailers and wrapped this around the MDF plate, enclosing the dust within the bristles.

He cuts boat parts from full sheets and after the MDF was cut, there was very little dust left. It worked quite well and was cheap to make. Now i'll try and dig out some photos t=of the setup as I'm sure my detailed explination confused everyone.

/M