I needed to clamp a whole series of pieces for my attic windows. The challenge was that the two pieces were cut at 45° angles, so there was no way to just clamp them and pray for the best. The pieces were joined by dowels, but this would apply also for biscuit joints or tenon-and-mortaise joints.

Before sawing out the parts, and after laying out the final form with a template, I fixed a block of wood on each side of the joint with screws in the scrap part of the workpiece. Rather than clamping the work piece, I clamped the two support blocks and pulled them strongly together.

I had been looking in many issues of woodworking magazines to find a dust cyclone cyclone, but found that the shipping costs to Europe were prohibitive. Finally, I found some smaller ones on eBay, Okay for small orbital sanders and routers, but undersized for a central separator job ( I’m using a Camvac 2.5 inch dust extractor, 110 CFM).

I started researching, and found two absolutely great sites, which should be mandatory browsing for all woodworkers. (1) Flowering Elbow ( http://www.floweringelbow.org/projects/the-cyclone-dust-separator ), which planted the idea of building my own cyclone separator, and (2) billpenz.com, which represents the Bible of Dust Collection (to stay in the same mood) and Cyclone Design. Awesome, impressive, superlative etc etc. His website even offers a cyclone sizing/calculating Excel spreadsheet!

I’m not a metal man, I cannot weld, and I’m not married to Rosie the riveter.

That left me with a nice little puzzle how to build such a cyclone. On one of my exceptional outings from our beautiful countryside,I got stuck in the road works around Albi, and there was my Solution:

Believe it or not, but I went to a regular store to purchase a traffic cone, which sells for less than 10 US$ each.

The cyclone separator has three main parts: (1) an upper cylinder, (2) a middle (traffic) cone, and (3) a dust bin. For the upper part, I used a 180 mm ( 7 1/2 inch) diameter stovepipe, into which I cut an opening according to the Bill Pentz design sheet:

The interesting thing about this design was the air ramp in the upper cylinder. This forces the air down into the cone ( and ultimately in the dust chute), whereas the “clean” air travels upwards to the central vertical tube. A skewed inlet helps orient the dusty air downwards. In the picture below, you see the upper cylinder before the top lid is put in place:

A closer look at the skewed air inlet:

And the whole contraption, once finished:

Works very well for collecting chips. I’m not yet sure how much (fine) dust is captured, that is the next step.

PS. A late entry today by my baby sister. Very to the point! Thanks Bei!

The sled runs on two parallel guides, which run in the two slots of the table saw. I used a square of Quickstep laminate floor covering about 25 x25 in, because its bottom face is very smooth and glides easily, as well as very hard.

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In the two vertical fences  at the front and the back of the sled, I embedded a curtain rail in aluminum, so that it would not protrude. It is located sufficiently high, about 4 in above the sled bottom, so that the saw blade will  not reach it.

At the front side of the sled, towards the operator, i fixed two pieces of MDF, left and right from the sawblade with a distance in between them of approx. 1/4 in. They protect hands from the sawblade once it cuts through the vertical front fence. In addition, I attached a handle of a discarded handsaw to the sled, this facilitates an easy grip.

I have a number of fences and stopblocks that attach to the aluminum U-rails of the vertical fences. These allow me to cut to length, but also to cut dadoes or joints. See the pics for some examples. I also use jigs to cut 45° angles, e.g. for frames or miter boxes.

Finally, for safety, I mounted the blade guard of the table saw on the sled. Wish I had done it before, it would have saved me 2 mm of my index finger…. A painful lesson I won’t forget.

All of the table tops of the machines are horizontally aligned, so that I use e.g. the bandsaw table or the router table to support long cutoffs on the miter saw. Since each of these machines has a “dead zone”, none is hindering another one.

At the same time, I installed a combined dust extractor box connected to each machine. I drilled five 2 1/2″ holes on one side (disposed in a circle of about 9″diameter), and connected these holes with flexible hoses to the different machines.

On the inside of the box, I installed a 12″ diameter wheel made of MDF, in which one hole was drilled that matches the position of the five holes in the side of the box.
Finally, at the bottom of the box, one 2 1/2″ hole connects with a flexible hose to the central dust extractor system.

The wheel extends about 1 1/2″ above the top of the workstation surface at the back, through a slot that I routed.

To select an outlet, I turn the wheel left or right to one of five markers, so that the corresponding opening at the back of the box matches the one opening in the wheel, thereby sealing off the  openings to the other machines.

To complete the setup, I installed an overhead light, and mounted a homemade dust filter above the machines, to capture as much as possible of the airborne dust at the source.