Our Big Dust Collection System

One of the things folks comment on when they walk through our shop is how clean it is. We are less likely to have accidents or fires, and better able to make quality instruments in a clean environment. To maintain the shop the way we do, we have a big dust collection system.

Notice the flexible ducts running up to the large metal ducts along the top of the wall.

Each tool has a hose to it to collect most of the dust. These hoses go to a central system running along the walls in our shop, and out to our dust collector.

Our dust collection system. For a sense of size, those are 55 gallon barrels!

We collect our dust into 55 gallon drums, and typically fill between 3 and 5 every week. Our dust is too fine and contains too many exotic woods to be useful (some dust can be used to make pellets for wood burning stoves, bedding for animals or even feed, but our dust can't be used for any of those purposes).

We also have 4 air scrubbers pulling finer dust out of the air and a couple of really big filters on our furnace/air conditioner that we need to change every month. And worst of all, we sweep... a lot!