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I just got a Dust Deputy to add to my dust collection system.
It was a lot smaller than I expected.
I got it bolted to a old bucket and hooked up in line with my shop vac.
I noticed the difference immediately.
Before the finest bits of sawdust would blow right through my shop vac. It is not a lot of dust but it is noticeable in the confided space of the garage, creating a slight haze in the air as the XC runs. Especially when carving MDF!
This “miasma” of dust is not there now.
The sound of the shop vac has changed. Before it was a high pitch whine of the shop vac under load. Now it is more of a low roar. Similar to how the shop vac sounds when you disconnect the hose from it. It actual seems a bit louder, but the lower pitch sound is not as grading on the nerves.
I am not sure if the change in pitch represents any change in load on the shop vac, but if it does it may save a little wear and tear on it.
You can see the dust build up and swirl in the Dust Deputy. I was surprised at how quickly the dust build up from my simple test cut. Especially because my current dust shoe is not very effective.
On the down side all that swirling dust builds up a huge static charge. The hairs on my arm started to stand up when I got close to the collection hose on the router. That probably is not good. I will have to add some grounding strips to the setup.
I am still messing with hoses and couplings. It will take me a while to get it setup right. But on the whole I think this will be a valuable addition to my setup.
Get this or build one before you blow something up, that dust ignites like napalm in right conditions !
My tips .:
Don’t be stupid like me and put plastic bag into bucket for easier cleaning, it will get sucked into the system and you will feel very stupid.
Use metal bucket, my plastic one got crushed at some point into a size of Mellon.
I made a big MDF box for my Dust Deputy. It holds about 50 litres and doesn’t need empying that often.
I too tried the plastic bucket which squashed after few uses.
Ain’t it awesome? I have three Dust Deputies now, myself. One on my shop vac out in the shop (I have two shops, an indoor and an outdoor) that I use for dust collecting off of my tools and general clean-up, one on my dad’s at his place, and one attached the the dust collector I have pulling off of the X-Carve and the laser through a wye and blast gates. Mine are all on commercial standard 5-gallon buckets, so far so good. I’m planning to upgrade to a “super” dust deputy for the X-Carve at some point, it’ll make much better use of the dust collector’s volume.
I’m extremely impressed with them, though (obviously). I’ll definitely keep on using them!
I just emptied my dust bucket.
That is a lot of sawdust!
I feel like I should find something productive to do with it.
As it is I think it will probably much down pretty good.
Most MDF theses days (at least the stuff I get) is rated E0 which is low formaldehyde may be safer to burn. there are lots of arguments for and against but I’ve never seen a real breakdown of the by-products and how they react in a fire.
One thing to watch out for though is that it burns much hotter than just wood so restricting use to fire starters is best.
Just to jump on: I’ve had a dust deputy since day 1: Was super skeptical, since it’s such a simple concept. But I’ve filled that thing with basically zero stuff in the Rikon dust extractor. Magic. Highly recommended.
I wrote the same in this thread, but maybe it makes more sense to ask here. Apologises for the double content.
I am about to put together a Dust Deputy and was looking into grounding options. Some people use internal grounding, some use external. This grounding kit’s instructions refer to both: internal as main grounding, external as extra.
I think I have a fundamental gap on how external grounding works. Assuming we use a plain non-conductive hose and the static build-up is happening on the inside, why do we need to ground the outside?
I’ve been running three of 'em for a few years now, and I’ve never run into any need to ground them, myself. Worst it gets is at my planer, and that only gives minor carpet-type static shocks from time to time. It’d be NICE to have it grounded out, but not even vaguely worth the additional complication.
Figure the issue just doesn’t present itself in an unheated shop on the U.S. east coast. The lowest humidity on any day during the year is about what dry state folks will see in a rain storm.
I understand that there is a big discussion about whether this is a necessity or an overkill.
My point is different though. Regardless of whether this is necessary or not, I am still curious about how external grounding works with internal static on a non-conductive pipe.
Is external grounding not external only, but an add on? Does it come in contact with internal conductive parts?
How random, I was just going to do a post about how awesome the Dust Deputy is, which I just installed yesterday. First off, these things should pretty much be a standard buy for your dust collection, I wish I would have realized months ago.
Next, I hadn’t done anything about the static before, but it was really bad-- so much so that I could feel the hair on my arm stand up several feet away from the hose itself.
So I thought why not do something with the dust deputy. My only concern is something electrical being discharged upon.
I ran a wire through the hose that comes from my dust boot, down through the vortex funnel, and out through the gasket between the funnel and the bucket. I left enough wire that I could then just run the lead to the concrete floor winding it around a big washer.
Interesting solution! Would be somewhat tougher for me, I’d have to drill a hole in the bucket lid, I think, since mine is silocone-sealed on. Will have to work on that, especially with the planer.
Very nice workup, I kind of wish Inventables would sell some of these items that a lot of people are using directly on their website, not that its hard to get these off amazon or anything.
So, used mine in a rather unexpected capacity over the last two days, and it was a no-kidding lifesaver. We live in the basement apartment of a house built in ~1903, with the apartment itself built in the early 70s. As a result, the apartment is plumbed with galvanized steel pipe. On Sunday night, my wife walked through my shop to the restroom (my shop is the original master bedroom, long story there)… and found that our back hallway was waterlogged such that the carpet splashed when you stepped on it. My shop vac has been upgraded to a pleated-paper filter that offers exceptional filtration… but is NOT waterproof. And I found out that when I removed it, the vac hauled the float-ball that’s supposed to stop the vac when it fills with water up to shut-off, even when the entire barrel is empty. With the water spreading fast, I made a run for the X-carve table, and pulled the hoses for the 1hp dust collector I use off of the Dust Deputy installation. The little bit of dust in the bucket went in the trash, and a quick bit of duct-tape work later, it was rigged to my shop vac, with the filter in place.
This was my first try using the Dust Deputy in its liquid-separation roll, it’s listed for the purpose, but I’d never tried it beyond using it to wash out a persistent bit of gunk in the cyclone before. Man, it works GREAT. Separates water even better than it does dust, and that’s already very good. Over the course of Sunday night and Monday morning, we pulled two full five-gallon buckets out of the carpet, plus a bit, going over it every half hour or so to stay ahead of it. Yesterday evening, we finally found the source of the flooding (a pinhole rusted in one of the water pipes) and killed the main supply, stopping the ingress. I am also fortunate enough to have a brother in law who runs a professional carpet-cleaning service, and he brought me one of his big extractors to use in cleaning up the last of the water in the carpet. But for about twenty-four hours, that shop-vac and dust deputy kept the leak contained to just that one area of the hallway and out of our living space, drop by sucked-up drop! We’ve replaced the pipe now, and are just waiting for the solvent to dry before we bring pressure back up to the house.
This has no relation at all to using it to filter your X-Carve chips, but I thought was a darn cool demonstration of its versatility!
