Rikon Portable Dust Extractor
Buy Rikon Portable Dust Extractor at Woodcraft.com
I am looking for a quiet dust solution. Building a closet isn't a good option at this time. Thought about building a box for shop vac but saw this today. Wondering if it is as quiet as it says it is. I turn in the basement when kids asleep upstairs so need something quieter.
If you don't own this but know of another quiet and not terribly expensive option would love to know about it. Wearing a good mask now, using fans etc but there's still dust in the air when I take the mask off, it gets in around my beard etc.
Thanks!
Warren
Thanks for starting this thread. I too have little/no dust collection other than a shop vac with the wide floor attachment zip tied to an HF magnetic base. It is far too noisy for turning any time without my two year old wanting to be up my butt scared the whole time. I've been wondering about noise on the small DC from HF. Being that I just received 60 blanks in the mail as part of a woodturners "estate sale," I have a reminder of why I need a DC!!
Warren..I've noticed this unit for some time but wondered about it's CFM... Seems like it's very low for the size and price... I currently use a Onedia (?) dust devil/shop vacuum, Rikon Shop air filtration system and a 20" box fan/w/hepa air filter... But always looking for a better system as air quality is a must... Please keep this entry posting updated as I'm sure I'm the only turner interested in a good, inexpensive system to add to their shop!!! Safe turning to you and yours!
Interesting time for this to come up...I JUST went through this. Here's what I've been doing and my thought process/thoughts on the situation.
Here's the set-up I've been using for dust collection. A
16 gallon stainless Shop-vac with a
10 gallon Oneida Dust Deputy.
I started off using only the Shop-Vac then I bought the Dust Deputy and thought I would be good. The system seemed to work fine for my router table (with dust collection in the chamber for the router as well as at the fence with a 2 1/2" flex hose), but it just didn't work on the table saw which has a 4" opening at the saw with a 4" to 2 1/2" adapter and 2 1/2" flex hose to the Dust Deputy.
So when I started turning I bought the PSI hood for my lathe and used a 4" to 2 1/2" adapter with the Shop-Vac/Dust Deputy combo. The Shop-Vac/Dust Deputy combo just wouldn't pull the chips from the lathe. The reason was that there wasn't enough CFM with the system.
Now the Shop-Vac I have is rated at 210 CFM (follow the above link) and the Rikon you're looking at is rated at 106 CFM. I know the 4" hose should flow better than the 2 1/2" I was using but honestly - for most anything you're going to be doing - you're going to want a higher CFM unit. The only way to evacuate chips like you'll see on a lathe (especially those strings from acrylic) is with a high CFM dust collector.
So I looked at dust collectors. We don't have a Harbor Freight on the island so that wasn't an option. I went to Woodcraft, saw what they had available, did some research, and picked up a
Jet DC-1100VX-CK, which is currently 15% off. It has a single 6" inlet but comes with a dual 4" inlet adapter so you can branch off to two 4" flex hoses without issue. I currently have one to the table saw with a blast gate on that 4" inlet at the dust collector, and a 4" to 2 1/2" adapter on the other inlet with the 2 1/2" flex hose I used with the Shop-Vac on the router table. Works very well and I can quickly drop the 4" to 2 1/2" adapter and stick on a 4" flex hose for the lathe or cap that inlet if I'm not using the router. What's nice is that with a single 6" inlet and the adapter - as you expand the shop you can go to a single 6" main and run 4" drops to each piece.
I actually picked up the Jet yesterday and rearranged the shop today so I could easily connect all of my major dust/chip producers without issue.
Now...between the two there's no comparison. The Jet far exceeds the capabilities of the Shop-Vac/Dust Deputy combo when it comes to filtering out dust.
As far as noise, check this out.
The Shop-Vac/Dust Deputy. You can see the Shop-Vac is just about 3 ft from the meter.
And the Jet DC-1100VX-CK.
If you guys want I can actually show graphs of dB readings across our range of hearing to see where the highest dB readings happen.
Anyway, if you have a Harbor Freight in your area you could go with
their 2 HP dust collector and later get a Wynn 35A filter for it. Would still end up cheaper than the Jet unit I bought (even with the 15% discount) but it seems to have a single 4" inlet with a dual 4" inlet adapter. I'd rather have the Jet's single 6" with dual 4" adapter.
Basically, if you want to eliminate dust, the first step get a big CFM dust collector and a good filter. The next step after that get an air handler to filter anything that's floating.
That Rikon's 106 CFM though a 4" flex hose isn't going to satisfy you (the CFM will drop the longer your hose run is) and, if it does, you'll likely end up wanting something that will do more (evacuate more air) in the (near) future.
I'm of the opinion that if you're going to spend the money it's best to do it once and be done with it. Otherwise you end up regretting spending money multiple times to come to the same end result. I thought I'd be good with the Shop-Vac/Dust Deputy combo but it's just too weak for the table saw (doesn't pull enough CFM). It'll cost more initially but be cheaper in the long run - healthier too.
Check out the following link. It gives basic CFM requirements for various woodworking machines and has a guide for calculating a good size collector. You'll notice the Rikon's 106 CFM is well below even the lowest rated CFM for any machine on the list.
Figure Dust-Collection Needs
My next step is an air filter like the
Jet AFS-1000B which has a max flow of 1,044 CFM.
Here's an interesting link on Rockler about dust and filtration.
Dust particles are measured in microns, or thousandths of a millimeter. Larger dust particles – greater than 100 microns or so – are heavy enough to fall to the floor quickly. This is the debris that dust collectors are so effective at removing. Fine dust particles, on the other hand, don't have enough mass to fall quickly to the floor and can float through the air in your shop for a surprisingly long time. Once a 5-micron wood dust particle is stirred up, it will stay aloft for 30 minutes or longer, depending on air movement.
Dust particles of less than 10 microns constitute the primary respiratory health risk to woodworkers. They're easily stirred up, stay aloft for a long time and – worse – travel easily into the deepest reaches of the lungs, where they are reported to cause problems ranging from mild allergic reactions to severe and chronic respiratory ailments.
The Jet AFS-1100B Air Filtration System, for example, has a maximum setting of 1044 cfm, which means that it will filter the entire volume of air in a 20' X 20' shop more than 12 times per hour.
:doctor:
