Dust Extractor

[Hali]

Hi all!

I'm a novice woodworker and I've recently acquired a lot of power tools. My one issue is the sawdust. I know there are dust extractors but it is confusing how many different brands and prices are available. I have a variety of corded and battery-powered machines, the majority of which are Dewalt or Makita. I also have an older Dyson that works well. Is it possible to convert it? Is there anybody out there who knows of a decent yet cheap dust extractor?

[Justintime]

I have an older version of this, they come up on Facebook Marketplace for £50-100.
https://www.toolden.co.uk/p/metabo-mpts ... pgQAvD_BwE

[Not your average framer]

I have a workshop vacuum cleaner which I bought from Agos years ago, it's very noisy and does not have a power take off where you can plug in your power tools to self start the vacuum cleaner when you switch on your power tools. I rarely use it because the noise is normally too much, but a reasonably powerful vacuum cleamer generally gets the job done. If it's not raining, or very cold, I like to use anything which creates saw dust out side, without bothering about dust extraction and the dust ends up in the back yard and after the next windy day the dust gets blown about a bit and most of it ends up in our garden. I always wear a dust mask just in case anyway. Proper dust extractors usually cost quite a lot and unless you are producing lots of saw dust all day long the cost might be prohibitive. I rarely use my power tools, which create saw dust much more that one hour in an average month. So I find it easier to set up in my back yard instead. I have a good range of basic woodworking power tools, but needing to use them all that often is not very helpful to me and not always particularly the most effective use of my time. I use my woodworking power tools, only when I have to!

I make a limited amount of dispay cabinets, display boxes and sometimes deeper than usual deep box frames. It's a bit to easy to spend quite a bit of time doing woodworking tasks which take more time than my necessily get paid for. At the end of the day you are supposed to be working for a worthwhile profit and that's not always as simple as it works out. Making money out of woodworking stuff, which can't be done it batches, is rarely economical for me to do. I do quite a lot of stacked moulding frames and I'm quite well known for doing it. Over the years, quite a lot of my popular mouldings for making stacked moulding frames have been discontinued and I have needed to adaptother moulding to suit. This is typically a matter of chopping bits of off one moulding to make it fit in place of something else which has been discontinued. Doing stuff like this in such a ways as to be economically worthwhile is not always a sensible proposition.

[vintage frames]

It sounds like what you've got is a selection of hand-held powered tools so dust extraction should be fairly straight forward.
Get a Henry vac and buy a very long hose for it - not the Henry type hose but one that's meant for hand held machine tools, ie Amazon, E-bay or Axminster tools.
What you don't want is the hose clattering about around you as you work, so have it coming down loose from the ceiling. That's why I said buy a very long hose.

[Not your average framer]

Henry vacs are great! I have noticed that making sawdust is often a lot easier than making anything useful. Like it, or not, I'm very good at turning useful wood into saw dust, most of us are!