Well I think I finally did it....
I broke the bank today, and I'm going to have to fix up that dog house now...
I've been making tons of progress on the dream shop and today dropped the final load of cash for all the dust collection ductwork. Man was it expensive and COMPLICATED, I spent a week just figuring out a parts list and going over it until I could'nt find any more problems with my layout. It's easy in theory to do the layout, until you start having to work up and order and make sure that your plans will actually work
I have to say that Penn State is one great company, I used their planning service and they laid out a really nice setup for me. I made a number of changes to it like running 7" pipe all the way through the shop ceiling as opposed to 6", but their plans solved a number of sticky issues for me. They have been nothing but helpful and professional and I highly reccomend them to anyone wanting to upgrade their dust collection system.
Along with the ductwork I ordered a ceiling mounted air filter to keep the fine dust down, I'm not sure there is much else I can do to keep the dust out of the shop. The table saw now has a dust collector on the top and I'm sealing the back with sheet metal so it can collect on the bottom as well. I added drops to the workbench so that I could do dust collection there if I was working on something.
The only issue now is one that Paul Woolson warned me about and that's the dust collector filling up quickly, I'm thinking about rigging a larger bin to collect the waste or maybe get two that I can swap.
Also in case some of you had not noticed Grizzly is now selling pre-made shop cabinets at really good prices, I looked for a long time for a pre-made solution and all of them where SUPER expensive, when I worked out the grizzly one the cost was 1/4 the cost of having one put in and I get more storage with the grizzly setup.
So all that's left is to get the cabinets installed next month (it's going to take some time to run all that ductwork, my arms hurt just thinking about it), then the very last thing is we are going to have an air conditioner installed in the shop so I can work in the summer without cooking.
Previously I worked in the early morning and late evening and did other things in the afternoon when it got hot, we want to avoid that here. The 'Boss' is expecting me to be producing things as soon as we get this shop finished, talk about a slave driver!!!
All this is a little scary because before we had been making little purchases here and there and it took 5 years to build up the shop, this time we are nailing it one big drop. It's added up so fast with materials, time, new tools, building and the CNC machine which we are still paying off
To add insult to injury, I have a TON of tone wood that I've been collecting but I don't have things like kerfing, bolts, carbon rods and all the little things so at some point I have to place more orders so I can start building again, and we all know how expensive the little things can be when building.
I feel better now, I just needed to share that with someone and the 'Boss' is out of sympathy on this one, especially since she wrote the check for the ductwork this morning
Cheers
-Paul-
