A week or so ago, I finally decided to start reassembling my dungeon workshop. This, of course, was after the flood. Everything was still in turmoil. But I needed to make something down there, of course, and it had to be done within a couple of days. In other words, I proceeded to simply shove everything out of the way and start cutting.

One important thing needed to be done, though. I had to reconnect my dust collector.

My dust collector is a small one that was designed to clean the air local to where you were doing work. But the suction it provides is sufficient for greatly reducing the amount of airborne dust when it’s connected to the tablesaw, which is most important to me. I use the tablesaw more than any other tool. So, when I bought this little collector, it had a bag connected to the output which collected the dust and also acted as the filter. I could not use it like that with the tablesaw, since I’d need to empty it too frequently.

I adapted the collector by adding a big wooden box between the fan and the filter bag. So, now the filter bag only collects the fine dust and the bigger sawdust stays in the box.

When my basement was flooded, the fan was disconnected from the sawdust box and set up to suck air in from outside to help dry things out. It did a good job of that, actually, since it does move a lot of air.

After I reconnected everything, I emptied the box (which was quite full of sawdust) and started it up. I then went to bang the inside of the tablesaw cabinet to get the sawdust that was in there to go into the dust collector. There was a lot in there, actually. So, I pushed all of this stuff out to where it could be sucked up by the dust collector.

When I stood up, I saw that the room was completely filled with sawdust. I looked at the dust collector and saw that one end of my wooden collection box had become a sawdust fountain. Sawdust was shooting up 6 feet into the air and blossoming out in all directions. Everything in the workshop had a fine layer on it.

When my basement flooded, it also acted as a bit of a cleaning for the workshop. Well, that was undone in a few seconds.

Here’s what happened. When I made the box, I used peel-and-stick weatherstripping to seal the lid. The filter bag is mounted in the lid and the lid is clamped down onto the box. To empty the box, I need to remove the lid. I guess that this time when emptying the box, the stickiness of the peel-and-stick weatherstripping finally gave up and some of it fell into the box when I put the lid back on. When I turned the machine on, it didn’t spew any abnormal amount of dust because it was actually empty.

Well, it’s good that the workshop is getting back to normal. And my real number one defence against dust is a dust mask. I will be the first to admit my dust collection system is pretty much pathetically non-existent. And I would say that I would consider making the situation better, but I know I won’t. Well, maybe I will get a vacuum cleaner to hook up to the radial arm saw, since that thing covers every square inch of the room in dust as soon as I use it.

For now, however, it’s not practical to use the radial arm saw, since all the stuff I had piled up on the tablesaw is now piled up on that.

And covered with sawdust.