Dust Deputy

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 have switched from the regular Dust Deputy (sister picked it up for me for $35) to the Ultimate Dust Deputy and boy is it great.

I never made any provision for static with the original DD and had no problems and now with the UDD have an earth connection throughout my system.

Here is my UDD video:

Peter

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@New_Brit_Workshop, great video. Thanks for sharing.

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I just emptied my dust bucket.
That is a lot of sawdust!
I feel like I should find something productive to do with it. :wink:
As it is I think it will probably much down pretty good.

If there’s any MDF in it, then throw it away…

After your tenth bucket, trust me, you just want it to go away. lol

I have a dump pile that is now knee-high, a couple feet deep, and probably four feet long.

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.

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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.

It works perfectly!

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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.

As a side note for others or those who might not have a a floor suitable to ground/discharge the static to you could attach the wire to your vacuum provided you have a ground electrical outlet. http://www.oneida-air.com/static.asp?htmltemplate=static/ultimate-dust-deputy-grounding-path.html

also here is a thread on controlling static for the x-carve
https://discuss.inventables.com/t/controlling-static-in-my-dust-vacuum-hoses

Amazon Prime has been absolutely indispensable for our business, especailly as I live half an hour outside of any town.

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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! :slight_smile:

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Cool story, and good to know. I wondered if it would work for water but I hadn’t read the info enough to know. That’s good timing because I’m thinking of taking out my water softener or rather water not-softener, and I wanted a way to clean out the water and salt to make it easier to handle.

Sounds like a decent plan to me, bail out what you can, then bust out the shop-vac. That salt would be a killer on the vac alone!

For static control I removed the plastic on the outside around the wire in the hose (manufacturer recommended this) (only have to remove enough to solder onto the wire like 1/8" wide strip about 1/4" long with a box cutter. This I attached to a silicone insulated (super flexible) wire I ran along the pipe and connected it at 3 points along the hose (because I don’t know there are no breaks inside that hose). Those run to a ground pin on the same circuit as the x-controller (no ground loop) and I used copper tape from Adafruit to go through the dust deputy to connect all that up (supposedly that plastic is conductive but I trust copper). It has be static free.