DIY Acrylic Overhead Table Saw Dust Collection and Safety Guard
i need to make a table saw shroud for dust collection and safety i'm gonna try and use acrylic for the first time i've never worked with it i also have zero plan so i have no idea what i'm doing and you're gonna see me fumble around a lot [Music] i have approximated what i am going to cut i'm going to cut it out on the bandsaw then i'm going to sand it to my line one aside [Music] two sides so here's the thing i want these to encase the table saw blade in a narrow sort of fashion so that hopefully doesn't get too much in the way of the fence and it won't lose too much airflow for being too wide but this fitting is fairly wide instead of making it the width of the fitting i want to maybe taper it in so that the fitting will fit on top but it comes to a more narrow opening on the bottom but instead of just having a straight taper maybe i can bend it [Music] wow it is kind of hot oh wow oh it's just sharp so it is bending [Music] i'm liking what's happening here what i need to do now is find some way to kind of close in the whole sort of top side of this shroud and to close that in i just want to simply use more acrylic that i'll curve and glue on like that because i bent this this edge is no longer consistently at the same angle across here i need to come up with a way where i can reestablish this edge to be kind of in one sort of curved plane that doesn't make sense [Music] now this is all kind of in the same sort of curved plane and that'll be good i can start to get the pieces i need and i'm going to try and mark that out by just simply rolling this along here and marking as i go [Music] now i'm going to bend these pieces so that they will fit around the curves [Music] oh wow oh yeah oh that's so cool oh my god [Music] so flexible [Music] i'm probably doing this in the wrong order go oh boy i'm ruining it already that went a lot better than i thought and it really tacked itself down there and i think i more or less got it aligned i didn't even need any activator there it just stuck that went better than expected and the edge looks really clear too which is really cool i think the heat with the ca glue made it cure really quick so now i'm going to make an acrylic piece to go over this flat part on the top which this will bolt to instead of cutting out the piece first i'm going to cut the hole out for the dust collection i will drill a hole and use a jigsaw when i have drilled through acrylic in the past because i made an acrylic drum set once i have found that normal twist bits can break it if you're not careful but these metal step bits work really well in acrylic [Music] killer [Music] i think i got the fit i was looking for i can glue that [Music] i think i approximately have the fit i want along this edge right here so now all i have to do is heat this part up again to make it more malleable and i can attempt to glue it all together oh [Music] oh no no it kind of moved you can do it squeeze kinda had a little bit of a slip up there and i made a bit of a smudgy well could have gone worse i think it's acceptable now i need to trim off all the excess that's hanging off the sides and in some spots there's a lot so before i go to a flush trim router bit and attempt that i think i'm just going to bring it to the bandsaw and skim off some of the excess [Music] i almost put a round over on it but i decided against it i think it looks better with sharper corners and i don't have to remove these little blocks well okay that one came off and that one came off whoa it looks pretty dope [Music] wow that's really nice now that the guard is complete i need to do a couple things to mount it i want it to raise and lower and i also want to swing completely out of the way i begin by making the portion that will clamp the pipe onto the bracket i rough cut this cove on the bandsaw and i cleaned it up by running it diagonally through the table saw [Music] i drilled and recessed a hole for a carriage bolt to secure the clamp to the [Music] pipe i cut two square pieces of quarter inch mdf and glued them together temporarily with painters tape then i use my router and compass to turn the squares into circles [Music] on one of the circles i use the same setup to route two symmetrical slots along the circumference [Music] i transferred the location of the slots to the other circle to drill two holes where wingnuts and bolts can be used to lock the circles from rotating [Music] now i can make a wedge that will hold the pipe at the same angle that the pipe makes with the table saw am i using a hand tool where's the motor [Music] i made a fancy little curve on the bracket that mounts this whole assembly to the ceiling [Music] i made three rips and four cross cuts and here's the amount of dust left over on the tabletop i think it turned out pretty great was it a complete success maybe i think the real issue is my dust collector is really not up to the task with a bigger and better dust collector i think it would work perfectly now in my short little experience using this i immediately noticed that it's more difficult to get correct pressure behind the work piece as you're ripping because of the width of the guard itself you end up having to push slightly offset of the blade which can cause a different type of safety issue luckily it's very easy to lift up and swing out of the way so if i can't use it for a specific task it's no big deal to get out of the way i couldn't get any hardware for the mechanism i just had to use what i had laying around when stores open again i can get better plastic knobs for the mechanism i know i promised i was going to automate this whole dust collection system and i still am i just kind of tired of working on this right now so i might do a furniture project before i get back to that yeah i actually do make furniture not just shop projects you