I have an older 12" ridgid compound miter saw and I’m trying to find a decent dust collection solution. I have tried attaching a shop vac to the dust bag port. Then added a small rubber flange to the intake. This ended up just blow dust everywhere, I suspect I would benefit from a true dust collector with higher CFM but my shop vac is pretty convenient.
My next plan was to build and open face box around the back, then add a high flow office box fan with a paper filter. The idea would be that the high CFM of the box fan would keep the dust in the box even with a full open front face.
Have you guys found any other simple solutions that I might be missing?
I use a shop vac on my Bosch wider saw, but yeah depending on what you are cutting, angles and such, there can be a lot of spillage for sure. I am often cutting flooring and trim inside folks homes for work, and the wall behind my saw often needs some vacuum love before calling it done.
I tried adding wings to the ‘dust backstop’, and a back plate. Both hacks did not weather well in a construction environment, and neither were much help for dust when chopping wide stock, where the cut is happening 12” from the vac entry anyways.
All chop slider and chop saws seem to like that though from my experience. The only experience I had with something similar that was even close to clean running, was the $bigmoney radial arm saw with industrial 4” extraction setup in my high school shop class. That thing had a clamshell type shroud that covered most of the blade, and a proper geometry to allow the air to flow smooth where it needs. The space age greebled plastic monstrosities we buy these days have no aero engineers involved in the design of the vac shrouding from what I’ve seen. We get a 1” tube hanging off the back pretty much. You could hook the strongest vacuum to them but they will just tease the dust toward the tube… to actually contain it like it is supposed to be done.
Yeah, it seems to be that even a “real” dust collector isn’t going to help much because of that small port. If you’re building it into a bench, you can box most of it in; lots of examples on YouTube. Then a dust collector might be more effective, or a box fan like you suggest.
Personally, I’d start with a box fan or two because even if they don’t work out in this application,they’ll tell you whether a dust collector might be better, and box fans are never useless to have around. Worst case, you could build them into a shop air cleaner with your filters (also plenty of examples on YouTube).
Thanks for all the feedback. I looked at the bag style but just seems like lots of areas to collect dust and they don’t look great. Decided to make a box shroud out of 1/8 hard board. Decided to get fancy and make the back an arch like the swing of the saw. In hind sight this was terrible and I should have just made a rectangular box that bolted to the wall. I thought I was clever by making it thin and light but if I had made it out of thicker material I could have used the too for storage.
Not my proudest project but we will see if it works with the shop vac and then build from there
So did a few test cuts with the shop vac. It worked ok but not perfect. Starting looking locally for a dust collection system and there might be a few options.
Does anyone have experience with these dinky little guys?
Seems to be many manufacturers making the same style.
Noticed most come with a 30 micron bag, was thinking of getting a 1 micron bag upgrade. Db level seems to be ok and might actually be quieter than my shop vac but I’ve never heard one run in person
No way. I’ve heard people say that it’s just as loud but lower pitched and more pleasant. My impression is that it’s definitely quieter, no qualification. Maybe about as lots as stuffing a shop vac hose into the exhaust port on my shop vac.
I keep thinking about building something for my mitre saw, but I usually just end up pointing the back of it out a garage door and letting the wind carry it away.
Yeah that was my plan originally but with the vehicles parked right outside I gotta keep them clean so the wife doesn’t complain about not being able to park in the garage.
