|
Dust control in a wood working shop, even a small model building shop, is an important health concern.
My shop has a kit-built powered air filter for capturing particulate matter, e.g. "floating" balsa dust.
The filter is the nominal size for a 20' x 40' shop, so it about 50% more powerful than necessary for my 10' x 18'
shop.
The singular advantage to using an oversized powered air filter is that the shop stays remarkably dust-free.
The objective of using a powered air filter is NOT to capture the dust that normally settles out on all the horizontal
surfaces in a building shop - those dust particles are so large (on the scale of dust particle sizes) that there is no pressing
need to capture them -for health reasons-. The dust particles this filter is designed to capture are the very much smaller
dust particles (measured in microns) against which the human body has no defenses - particles so small they can float in the air for
hours on end and which can settle in the lungs where they cannot be captured and removed by natural respiratory
mechanisms.
The "good" part of using an oversized powered air filter like this one is that the larger "normal" dust particles are also
captured, and dust that would normally accumulate in a wood shop are removed from the air before they have
a chance to settle out on horizontal surfaces.
Unfortunately, the air filter kit is no longer available, so the following few photos will document what is involved in
scratching one up.
This is the air intake end of the filter. Note the two wood screws (top and bottom) which retain the filter pack.
The filter pack consists of a "stack" of elements, where the outermost element (seen here) is a permanent washable pre-filter.
The middle element, behind the pre-filter, is a permanent washable electrostatic filter, and the third (innermost)
element is a disposable (non-washable) high efficiency filter bag.
|
