Thread: Any Shop Vac recommendations

Aldi vacs are often mentioned here as good value for money and fairly rugged.

I've got a ShopVac bought some years ago from Bunnings, it's proven to be quite reliable.. My only complaint is that it uses bags and they seem to fill very quickly.
I've just bought a Dust Deputy which should help make the bags last a lot longer.

Have you read my thread on actual air flows when tools are hooked up to VCs and DCs? . . . . . . and now that you have a super cyclone . . . . . . . . . .

Just bought the fein dustex from Sydney tools as a replacement to a stolen festool.

Very happy with it, new models have adjustable airflow and properly switched socket. Very powerful and quite quiet.

Yes Bob, I did see it. Again, first class work.

Very interesting. In recent weeks I must have read a squillion pages that explained, in chapter and verse, that DC's are no good for small tools like ROS and belt sanders. The accepted wisdom seems to be that DC's are low pressure, high volume machines, and that dropping the pipe size to pull air through a small hose and machine does not work; that we should be using a good shop vac (high velocity) instead. Amen.

But as our American friends would say, "In God we trust; all others must bring data". And you have done that. Thanks.

I took a look at my three sanders today. The two ROS have an outlet that is about 21-22mm inside diameter. At about 26mm, the belt sander is a tad bigger. Not very big, at all ...

Here is my current thinking: if I make up a transition type scavenger shroud that starts out at (say) 40X300 which transitions to a 150 mm pipe, and run a 150mm line to that, and if I came off this line with a smaller (I was thinking 50mm until I read your thread) line to the sander, that might be a reasonable set up for bench work.

But quite often I want to take the sander to the job, in the middle of my workshop. Also, my router is a mess making machine, and I need to clean it up. It too often travels to the job when (say) routing a rebate for the back of a unit. I was thinking that a set up for bench work is not enough. I need also to be able to sand/rout away from my benches occasionally, which means it could be away from a connection point for the ducting. So, that led me to believe I needed to think about replacing the vac, not as the primary approach with these machines, but rather as a back up approach when it is not practical to use the main DC system.

Originally Posted by John Samuel

. . . . . . So, that led me to believe I needed to think about replacing the vac, not as the primary approach with these machines, but rather as a back up approach when it is not practical to use the main DC system.

Sounds very reasonable to me.