: Thinking of turning my basement into my workshop (getting the boat out will
: be a good story). It will be a space about 11ft by 30ft. I have to be
: concerned though with dust collection. My furnace and water heater are in
: the basement (in another room) but a huge air intake is sucking air right
: out of my future workshop. So I am concerned about how to set up a dust
: collection system that actually does what it says it will do.

: My Woodcraft Catalog is loaded with dust collection doo-dads. My chief worry
: is getting a good fit around a router and a table saw. I can't for the
: life of me see how any dust collection system could cope with a thickness
: planer but I need to deal with that too somehow.

: How do you guys handle this? I have a very sweet wife and I'd really like to
: keep her that way - HELP!

Hi Tim -

Well, I'd take the cutting and milling of your strips outside. It's a hassle moving the tools, but you won't have enough room in the shop to mill the strips unless you're ripping fairly short planks.

I now use a basic Jet Dust Collector that I purchased from Woodcraft. It does an excellent job and doesn't howl like a shop vac. I still use a shop vac for the routers. Both my routers have dust collection ports that work very well hooked up to my shop vac. Table saws can be a problem. I found the dust port on my Ridgid thickness planer works very well, and thickness planers create larger chips than the fine sawdust you get from a router, sander, or tablesaw. You'll want to use an ROS for sanding your boat, so purchase one that you can hook up to a shop vac hose. When I was building in the basement near the furnace, I turned off the furnace blower for the few hours I was running sanders, etc. to avoid having dust sucked into the HVAC system. Then I cleaned up the shop before turning the blowers back on. Can you block that intake duct, or is that your major cold air return duct?

I found noise was more an issue than dust. Listening to a couple of hours of router music or ROS rock is more grating than sitting next to a Honda with 1000w subwoofers in rush hour gridlock. No longer a problem, since I'm living alone again. Something had to go

Jim