Thread: Ugly but effective!

Here's my dust/dirt unit as it stands at the moment.


My wife originally bought me the Shopvac because the old vacuum cleaner I was using was inadequate for a big workshop. The Shopvac was an improvement but still had limitations. Because it only had a small hose it was continually getting clogged with shavings. It also didn't take long for the filter to get clogged and reduce sucking power.That meant sweeping before vacuuming and raising all the fine dust again. So the first modification was to get the bigger hose. This led to learning about pipes, hoses and tubes and how they are designed not to fit one another. I found that the hose could fit onto a standard plumbing pipe if the pipe was turned down slightly.


At the other end, the nozzle was way too big for the pipe, but using a turned down pipe joiner fixed that.


But there were still limitations. Emptying the drum and cleaning the filter still managed to raise as much dust as had been collected.
I'd read about Dust Deputies and when I found a 20l dripping tin with a hole already in the top and a sealable lid to boot I got a DD sent from the US. I got 10' of hose sent as well. A pity the US hose isn't the same as the AU hose! More bodgeying with old plumbing bits to get everything to tie in.


I had another 20l tin which I bolted to the Shopvac. A big caster under the front end solved any balance problems.




A couple of cords hung over the edge stop any binding between the bottom tin and the one with the DD attached.



The end result? No sweeping, this setup will suck it all up, shavings to fine dust and deposit most of it in the 20l tin. There is still an amount of fine dust gets onto the filter of the Shopvac, but a conventional vacuum cleaner that I use for milled aluminium swarf removes all of that into a sealed bag. No Dust! Very infrequent loss of suction!

The next mod might be to get a pleated filter for the Shopvac to extend the periods between cleans.

DD/Shopvac