we're talking all things dust collection whether those big air cleaners actually do anything and we're going to find out if installing permanent ducting is a total waste of time and money because maybe there's a more efficient option you have small noisy shop facts and you have ginan sorus dust collectors why do people use one for one thing and one for another can't I just use my onein shop back hose for my planer well let me show you why that's not such a good idea by nearly asphyxiating myself a shop fact seems very effective that collecting the smoke at first glance but watch when I move the shop back hose farther away from the source of smoke it barely catches any of it after a few inches if I held the shop back hose close to my cutter head it would actually be pretty effective at collecting dust at that one spot in the cutterhead but the shopback is doing a whole lot of nothing anywhere else and no the dust shoot is not really going to help much in this case and we'll likely clog up with chips because shops don't have a lot of flow we measure flow in cubic feet per minute or CFM for short higher CFM is important because we need to move a large volume of air as quickly as possible to capture all the sawdust from our planer at all times and this is why a dust collector is better than a shop back for these applications a dust collector is a shopvac on steroids because you can get them with CFM ratings as high as 20 times that of a shopvac even for your small shop you can see how much more effective the dust collector is at capturing smoke from much further away when compared to the shopvac which is great news for our planer because the high flow means that it will collect chips from the entire planer and not just one spot but don't ditch the shopac just yet you can see that the shopvac doesn't seem to be as effective at first glance while the dust collector was able to suck almost all of the smoke up from further away because the flow of the dust collector is greater than the shopac but when I reduce a 4-in dust collector host down to a 1-in shop back fitting we can visibly see a much slower air flow than simply using a shop vac so why is this important well as it turns out we can't simply adapt the large dust collector hose for a smaller tool like a random orbit sander since this drastic reduction in hose diameter causes the flow to drop to an unusable amount but how do we know when to use a dust collector versus a shopac luckily for us the manufacturers of tools usually have this figured out and come with smaller connections for shop vacs On Tools like random orbit Sanders and larger connections for dust colle ctors on machines like planers and table saws so unfortunately to get it right eventually you'll have to equip your shop with both a dust collector and a shopac or there are a few new offerings on the Block including the supercell from Oneida that bridge the gap between dust collector and Shop back whatever Wizardry goes on inside these it allows you to go as large as a 4-in port for a machine and as small as a 1-in port for smaller tools and still get usable performance however you can spend Top Dollar on whatever dust collector you want but with some tools it might not make as big of an impact as you think one of the biggest reasons why I upgraded from my old DeWalt sander to my Mira sander was for the dust collection now I know you might not be far enough along in your woodworking journey to justify spending Top Dollar on such a high-end tool but random orbit Sanders are one of the times where spending top dollar is actually worth it because whatever the engineers designed into this sander it simply picks up way more dust than my old DeWalt one when using the same extractor so not only is this great for your lungs since Sanders are one of the worst culprits for the ultra fine sawdust that's most harmful to breathe but good dust extraction leaves a better result on your workpiece and it keeps your sandpaper lasting longer too this is my table saw which is a 25-year-old clone of the ubiquitous Delta unisa and the extent of the Dust collection design in these saws is a whole cut in the side of the cabinet a solid 2 ft away from the blade where all the sawdust is being created and now not only that but there are holes and orices everywhere in the saw and all of that just limits the amount of air flow that's near the blade the dust collector that I was using for years it's just so small it doesn't have enough power to suck up all the sawdust from a machine where dust collection was basically considered an afterthought I've been using the term shopvac rather Loosely until now shopvac is a brand and as a name implies they make vacuums for your shop that are relatively inexpensive iive the fact that shopvac is a brand name is Superfluous since most people call any vacuums from other brands like rigid shop backs as well there is a heightened version of a shopback that you may have heard before and it's commonly called a dust extractor not to be confused with a dust collector at first glance they seem to act very similar to a shop VEC and are used for the same applications so why do you see so many dust extractors in YouTube Bland wood shops as opposed to shops well there are a few subtle differences between between the two and I'll start with maybe a not so subtle one the price you can get a decent shop back for under a 100 bucks whereas dust extractors they start at maybe six times the price of a shopvac well that's a bit of a negative but the good thing is that you will get higher performance I looked up a bunch of data on shops and extractors and it seems that you'll get more power in a smaller package with extractors because you'll get just about two times the CFM in comparison to a similarly sized shopac you can get larger and more power for shopx 2o but I don't necessarily trust their numbers as they claim to be more powerful than a smart car on a good day vacuums are low in general but dust extractors are definitely a bit lower in volume compared to those noisy shop facts with a caveat many extractors now have a built-in Auto clean function and that's designed to clean the filter during use so the flow doesn't drop as much I've heard the 3M dust extractor before and that kind of sounds like a machine gun going off every 30 seconds and the Bosch kind of sounds like a cannon firing so every time I turn it on I have to press this little red button to disable the autoc clean every single time because I don't like being frightened when I'm using a tool like the miter saw maybe I'm a little jumpy I think all dust extractors come with a plug for automatically starting and stopping the vacuum when you plug a tool into it there are better shop packs that also have this but the cheaper ones definitely don't and you can also add one on a separate unit but I think if that's your goal should just buy a vacuum with this feature already in it if you're starting out get it
