Dirty Room?
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I don’t mean a room in the back of the shop for dirty things, I mean a special area for making a huge mess. :whistle:
I have another theory. Would it make sense to have a room built essentially like a spray booth just for collecting dust? I mean grinding, sanding, sandblasting, carving (the wood, plastic, plaster, foam and filler work I do) – all make metric buttloads of dust. Why not have a room for it with a bigass fan, and collect the dust in a cyclone?!? Seems like a great concept to me. I spend so much time cleaning up my wood shop, and I have a dust collector! it’s all the grinding and sanding that you can’t just collect with a downdraft sanding table, it’s gotta be a room. It could have some method of fire-prevention, the cyclone can be sheet metal, and 100% of the air can go back into the room after a little filter. No loss of heat, and a HUGE time savings in clean up for the small – medium sized projects I do around here.
Any thoughts?
an all this time i thought all u boys in alaska just dumped that crap into the ocean for the cruise ships an float planes
We do, I’m just tired of eating blubber since beached whale is all I can afford to eat! :hunt
OK, after some looking I learned that I’m not completely insane. Sanding booths exist.
How many of you guys have used one?
I’m very interested in using a cyclone instead of stupidly wasting filters. In fact, I think a paint booth could greatly benefit from a method of catching particles using moisture instead of cartridge filters…. but that’s research for another day.
dirty room would work if your working on stuff like pieces of furniture where one room can handle multiple jobs, multiple techs. if you want the shop to stay clean use dust less sanding discs and a vacuum system for your sanders. no need to reinvent the wheel!
I’ve seen prep areas with a grid floor like that, but not an actual room.
And as for your other idea – there are such things as wet back or water wash booths too, normally used for powder coating or smaller items, so maybe that kind of idea could be modified to suit your needs. A grid floor with a constant stream of recirculating water beneath it. You’d have to be very careful about dropping stuff though!!
[quote=”MoCoke” post=20602]dirty room would work if your working on stuff like pieces of furniture where one room can handle multiple jobs, multiple techs. if you want the shop to stay clean use dust less sanding discs and a vacuum system for your sanders. no need to reinvent the wheel![/quote]
Most of the dust I make isn’t controllable with vac sanders. I have dust collection for my little tools (jigsaws, etc.) and everything else for woodworking that is stationary, the killer is the sanders and grinders not on a flat car body. When I’m doing glass work I’m grinding and cutting and sanding all kinds of shapes, making billowing clouds of lung-destroying dust, which then settles on EVERYTHING… a whole room for sanding would be AWESOME and could also be used for sandblasting, etc., and washed down! a grate in the floor would be fantastic.
I recently bought a General air filter for the rafter area of my garage. It was hard to control the dust while woodworking in the garage and you end up with dust everywhere. It filters with two filters down to 3 microns and works like a charm. It’s keeping the dust in the garage down…may work for you while you get a complete solution worked out. Moves about 800 CFM and has a remote control.
[quote=”Canuck” post=20645]I recently bought a General air filter for the rafter area of my garage. It was hard to control the dust while woodworking in the garage and you end up with dust everywhere. It filters with two filters down to 3 microns and works like a charm. It’s keeping the dust in the garage down…may work for you while you get a complete solution worked out. Moves about 800 CFM and has a remote control.[/quote]
General eh? I’ve heard mixed things about the room filters, but I definitely plan to have one in my main wiring bay. Seems the sanding and woodworking always gets some dust in every other room of the shop.
I’m doing more research on this. I’m looking at building a huge cyclone from scratch. Could be fun, but is it worth it?
Has anybody done any substantial moldmaking work? I’m very interested in doing more boat work, including building fiberglass and carbon fiber skiffs. When grinding on composites the dust is terrible, the room becomes a complete disaster in 5 minutes, and expecting to collect all of it with a vacuum sander is a joke. 8″ grinders have vacs nowadays? I want to have a massive collection system for the room, not unlike a paint booth but with 100% air recirculation, and without the hassle of constantly changing filters. a big cyclone and cartridge filter would be perfect, the question is how big would it need to be to effectively get the job done. I would expect it to keep the air clear, and not allow glass to accumulate all over the walls and cabinets quite so bad.
The next option is have an exclusively ‘dirty room’ that is setup very much like a crossdraft booth with the air returning to the main airspace of the shop. This would save cleaning time, but require more goofing around time setting up for each operation wheeling in tool carts and cleaning them all up into a storage closet when done. This solution would not require as big a fan, but would only cut down on part of the goofing around process.
I want this room to be able to handle metal grinding, fiberglass and composites, body sanding, and woodwork. If I am going to spend the time and money to set it up I want to make it as versatile as possible.
I plan on having a woodshop, metalshop, paintbooth, mechanic shop, retail showroom, offices, and a couple apartments all in one giant steel building. I have all this stuff crammed into my shop now, but it totally sucks. When I step up to a larger space I don’t intend to screw around. I probably have 100 hours into research of this place in the last few years. If anyone has any concerns, comments, suggestions, direction, advice, guidance, recommendations, sources of more information – It is all greatly appreciated.
Bobwires, I don’t mean to push our product on you by any means but you may want to talk with one our industrial sales reps.
Whether or not you are interested in our product, they should be able to help you get an idea of what may work best for your shop. I know that we do have sanding booths and can custom build many different types of enclosures.
If anything, they should be able to point you in the right direction!
If you’re interested, I can give you the number.
I will certainly be better of buying a booth to stay compliant with the code, but frankly if I’m out of the city limits there’s not really any inspections here in Alaska. That said, my time is worth a lot, and building the room I’m talking about will be expensive and extremely time-consuming. I may just be better off picking up a paint booth and sanding booth and have them factored into the mortgage.
Thanks
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