Thread: A post for newbie's newer than me

This will probably only benefit folks with less experience than me, I dare say all the old hands worked this out ages ago (thanks Mini), but I was led to this forum by my attempts at dust extraction and have found it to be a wealth of knowledge.

I was fed up with the amount of saw dust that was being flung out of my Triton WC2000 (which caused SWMBO to cast some doubt over my heritage and the marital status of my parents at the time of my birth) and found several mentions in these forums about enclosing the bottom of the table and connecting it to a decent dusty.

My DC7 arrived last week and I set about enclosing the bottom of the table.

MkI was okay, but there were a lot of gaps and it looked like a dropped pie, but it did stop most of the saw dust from ending up on the ground . The thing I liked least about MkI was the way the saw dust piled up in the corners of the box.

I set about constructing MkII, ensuring that gaps were kept to an absolute minimum. I was pleased with the result and hooked it all up and commenced making small pieces of pine out of a big piece, but the dust still built up on three sides of the box.

Something Mini said in another thread about router tables got me thinking and on closer inspection there was a 3mm gap between the bottom of the enclosure and the end (no doubt due to a fault in the MDF ). Imagine my surprise when it was the same end where there was no dust building up.

I made some 3mm spacers and made the gap uniform right round the base and lo and behold, the only place dust sits is adjacent to each of the screws that hold the base on.

Now I have my table hooked up to the DC7 via my Thein second stage collector (44 gallon drum) and hook the shop vac up to the blade guard via my Triton dust bucket that I also turned into a Thein collector, and I could cut a piece of timber up in the lounge room now and not have to worry (about the dust anyway).

On to the Triton router table now to see if I can control the dust and chips that launch out of it.

There is nothing earth shattering in my construction, but I might post a few pics tomorrow.

Cheers

Oz