Shop Vac Cyclone Bucket and Rolling Cart for a Small Woodshop

Dave Ardito's small-shop dust collection system uses a shop vac with its bag removed, a bucket-lid cyclone separator that cost about $30, a bucket of about $6, and a homemade rolling cart. He says the vac was already in his shop, and he did not want to spend money on a full dust collector when he would rather buy tools.

Why the bag came out

At first he used the shop vac with its bag inside to pick up sawdust from his tools. The bag filled so quickly that he had to put in a new one each time, and emptying a full bag was difficult. He wanted to use the vac only for suction, with the filter keeping debris out of the motor, while collecting the dust elsewhere.

The cyclone lid

After researching cyclone dust separators, which range from very cheap to very expensive, he found a lid at Home Depot that fits a regular-size bucket. He believes it was made by a company called Dust Stopper. The vac pulls air through a pipe in the top of the lid, while a second pipe carries dust from the machine. Where that pipe feeds in, it creates a circular effect that lets the dust fall into the bucket instead of the vacuum hose. When he tested it with the bag removed, very little reached the vac itself.

The cart

The bucket was light enough that moving the hose at different angles tipped it over. His fix was a cart with room on the bottom for the shop vac, which is on wheels and can be blocked in or have the wheels removed to keep it stationary.

• Top: a half-inch sheet of plywood with a circular opening. He found the center of a roughly nine-inch board, put a nail through it, and drilled a hole at half the diameter of the ring under the bucket lip. He used that to draw the circle and cut it out with a jigsaw. The circle only has to be good enough for the bucket to seat on its lip.
• Frame: pine that had been drying outside for a few years, with verticals and braces at 90 and 45 degrees for stability.
• Bottom: a piece of half-inch plywood, with four leftover caster wheels bolted through the corners with a washer and nut on each.
• Extras: pine pieces glued and brad-nailed to the back post so the cord can be wrapped around as a handle, plus pieces intended to hold attachments.

The rigid hoses have a clip on the end, so he can pull the cart along by the hose.

Results

He demonstrated it on a bucket's worth of dust and says it did not lose much suction. Afterward he opened the vacuum, which held a little dust. An older filter had collected some, but the blue filters on his Rigid vacuum are washable and can be blown out and reused. The drawback is that the bucket has to be emptied every so often, depending on how much dust is produced. The lid pops off, and the dust can be dumped into a clear bag. He says any size of shop vac will do if it has enough suction, and that a standard 2 1/2 inch hose can take adapters for different tool sizes.