Any designs for DIY dust and debris collection?

I've been trying to come up with a plan for dealing with both the visible chips and the invisible fine dust that is produced when using these machines on MDF. I understand that dust collectors remove the unhealthy, invisible dust by moving a ton of air across a hepa filter. The messy dust that we can see however, generally requires something like a shopvac that produces more suction. Has someone come up with a DIY way to address both issues simultaneously? Is a shopvac with a HEPA filter good enough?

I bookmarked this a while back:
http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showthread.php?t=51385

Jack

Thanks Jack. I had seen that thread before, but I had lost track of which forum it was in. I wanted to check the bottle dimensions as here in North America, I thought water bottles from Dasani might be of the right shape and size for building one of those. Has anybody in North America built one of those vortex/cyclone dust collectors? What bottles were used?

Your welcome,

I had subscribed to the thread, so I wouldn't lose it. I not sure what size bottle to use here in North America. I do plan on building one, once I have built a router. I've done a cnc lathe and mill and now I've been looking at routers. I think I'm addicted to building cnc stuff rather then using them. Maybe the router will change that.

Good luck on the search,
Jack

I built myself a portable murder room. Basically a 1/2" PVC frame with 6 mil plastic over it. It is not hooked up to my dust collector becuase it wouldn't be useful and I don't like have a shoe over my router as I like to see it cut, need to see it to set bits and when doing test cuts I need to see it. My enclosure at least keeps dust from the rest of the shop which is hooked up to a dust collection unit.

Unique name for it...... but I like it.

I can see it might have many uses :)

Jack

Well it's inspired from one of my favorite shows "Dexter" on Shotime. He builds these little murder rooms.

I discovered after chewing away at some MDF and trying to make a bit of an extractions system with my commercial 1HP 100mm hose sucker, hat it was tidier to let the cutter do its job and let all the dust pile up under the cutter and everywhere. It just made it's own big pile which kept the dusty part inside the pile. When finished one pass with the big sucker and it's all gone.
Sad that I can't see where he job is up to, but when the motor turns off, you use the program to turn on the sucker. When it gets noisy, the job is done.
Life sucks.