Thursday 13 June 2013

Wood dust - I hate it

I was doing some routing of the baritone guitar pickup routs last weekend and took the thickness of the slab down a little with the jointer.
I made the mistake of running the router for a couple of minutes doing the initial cut without my PPE on - the shop vac was connected and running on the router.
I could smell the embuya dust in the air so put on my PPE comprising a 3M respirator with twin filter cartridges on.
I did a little shaping of the curves with the oscillating spindle sander and some normal sanding with the random orbit sander. I had the shop vac going and the shop dust extractor connected to the OSS.

After finishing in the shop for the night I showered as normal and later in the evening went to bed. Whist in bed before I went to sleep I coughed something up and got the smell of embuya again. I looked into my handkerchief (not a pretty sight I know!) and saw quite a lot of black and brown dust in the "deposit".
Next day I decided enough is enough. I went to the trouble of equipping the shop with all the correct dust collection equipment, including a ceiling mounted shop filter, what I thought was decent face PPE - ok maybe I should have put it on before starting the cut - and still the dust got through. Sooooooo..... I ordered a Trend AirShield Pro

It was expensive and it arrived today. I thought what a price to pay for decent lungs.
There will be a full review on the blog as soon as I have tried it out for a while. Watch this space.

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