Swarf Magnet for the milling table slots and other small areas.

[tonyfoale]

I made a cyclone which dumps all but fine dust in a bucket before it gets to the vac. So anything inadvertently picked up is easy to find.

Here are a couple of pix of the shop vac with the cyclone. It is not optimised I am sure, but it was easy to make from a metal bucket and it keeps almost everything from getting into the vac, and I hardly ever have to clean the filter.

Click thumbnails for full size.

I have a smaller vac which I use on a bead blaster, the one pictured is just too powerful for the blaster. Some fine dust (broken beads) would get through to the vac filter. Last week I needed to use the blaster and I started playing with bubbling the evacuated air through water to trap the dust but the system needed more development so I tried a very simple method instead. I just put about 50 mm of water in the bottom of the cyclone tub. It exceeded my expectations and hardly any dust got through to the vac filter.