Most of my work is carried out on various hard woods I run a well equipped workshop with a plumbed in 3HP dust extractor with various blast gates and remote controls
Dedicated to my mitre saw and sanding area I have a shopvac linked to a cyclone so all in all pretty well sorted
My Onefinity Woodworker is installed in the work shop in a purpose built enclosure which does a pretty good job of containing the chips and dust
Now I am starting to use the machine more its time to look at chip / dust issues
Way back when I completed a very traditional engineering apprenticeship where we used cutting oil, cutting fluid or air.
Obviously lubrication isn’t an issue with wood but one of the biggest causes of poor finish, reduced tool life and tool breakage is recutting chips that have already been cut.
Conventional thinking would be to link either the shop vac or main extractor to the Onefinity this raises a number of issues Electricity usage, noise, running a hose to the cabinet and running a house to the spindle along with the associated hose management issues within the cabinet coupled with if the One finity is doing a big carve or batching a number of items then some of my extract capacity is being used
I am currently trailing using compressed air to blow chips and dust away from the cutter, then at the end of the day vacuum out the cabinet to remove all the chips and dust
Started off just using a hand held air gun piped from my compressor, moved onto a similar gun gaffer tapped to the spindle so far great results no chip build up no loud extractor or shop vac compressor has a fair size tank so just switches on and off as normal
just starting to spec out a more permanent system with 2 orange and blue ball jointed coolant hoses mounted to the spindle mount fed by air pipes the same dia as the spindle coolant bound to the spindle coolant pipes and spindle cable, not so hard to manage as a 32mm or 63 mm extract hose and much lower noise.
Any one any thoughts or tried similar, I will post full pics once i have it assembled and happy with its performance
For those if us who did not employ an enclosure, using compressed air to blow chips/dust away would significantly increase an environmental hazard.
Beyond tool life considerations, what attention are you giving to keeping the guide rails and ball screws as clean as possible? I think that part of using a dust extraction strategy also has an ancillary effect of reducing build up on those components too.
The same thought applies to the router/spindle (unless you are not using a water cooled spindle). All of the airborne dust continually cycling through it will probably have a negative effect on its machine life too.
I think your idea is great. I feel the same about dust extraction while running the machine. However, I don’t have a full enclosure, just 8" walls and that contains most of the chips. I find the air from the router keeps the chips from being re-cut, so I don’t find that to be much of a problem. If it does build up before the end of the carve, I will just pause it and vac out the excess and then keep running. This way the only electricity I am using is the Onefinity itself. After the carve, I will give it a complete vac job to tidy things up which I would have to do even if I ran dust collection during the carve.
I’m worried about chip build up at the front of the machine beneath the rail. When the job is done and the machine returns to the front left corner, I don’t want it crashing and stalling because of a big pile of chips and screwing up the zero coordinates of my workpiece.
Regarding being too focused on dust extraction - your shop as a whole sounds pretty well equipped in the dust collection department! I have two shop vacs. One is dedicated to the CNC, and my other gets moved around each time I switch tools. Major pain in the rear, and I get tired and lazy and don’t always use it. I’m not focused nearly enough on dust collection!