Thread: Keeping the dust down with an electric planer

As time goes by increasing exposure to wood dust is getting up the ole schnoz.

I do woodturning and like to clean up the shavings which go everywhere after a bowl turning session. Both to keep the mind clear for the next session and to get rid of the dust. Even a couple of weeks might go by and just walking into the shed causes sneezing and a runny nose now with some timbers if not vacc'd up.

When blocking down spindle blanks out of green or salvaged timber I use an electric planer to get two square sides to put through the bandy. The bag that came with the planer fills in a minute.

This is a fix that might be useful to others:

The shop vac has a 2" hose with some tapering hard tubes. One of these fits nicely into the vac bag hole on the planer, with some minor mods. So the vac sits on a shelf under the bench, and I fire it up when using the planer. With a modest feed rate it sucks the shavings out of the planer.

It's not a perfect fix by any means. If the stock is narrower than the blades then there's still shavings kicked out on the bench. Which happens anyway with the bag.