Welding Tips and Tricks

Cold weather is coming quick and my garage is filling up with dust when I have the door semi closed. The fumes from the cnc plasma alone are terrible and I even have a water table. Then spray paint and grinding. I wear my respirator but I feel it isn’t enough. Has anyone built a booth that I can paint, and grind in to collect all the dust and leave the air remotely clean that I can work in without having to open the door and blow it out with a fan when it’s going to be 0* outside?
I have a fume extractor, it’s very small and I don’t think that would cut it for most people. I mainly use that when welding. Need something for the rest. I was grinding for 45 min last night and then spray painted and cutting before that. With my 3m respirator on and new filters even today my throat feels like I swallowed some of that stuff.

How much room do you have? And what would be a ballpark budget?
Im sure there are pre made systems for what your talking about, and with a little research, you could probably build something that works good.

Are you trying to do this for the entire space you work in or just a booth?

Hey,

My old trade school had a grinding room, where the benches had the traditional down draft and dust hopper, but the bench itself had raised walls of around a meter high that were a Louvre design, and were connected to the fan system, there were over head vents, similar to a ducted A/c system but they sucked air instead of blowing. Lot of work but it seemed to do the job.

Mick

just looking to make a small booth say 5" wide and 2 feet deep maybe 3 or 4 feet deep.
Super tight budget. Still have to see how I can blow the smoke someplace without letting all the cold air in too.

Same idea, I want a booth to suck up all the air and has to be on the opposite side of my furnace in the garage.
It's a 3 car garage but all my stuff (mostly) is on the one car side and the rest is occupied with storage, kids toys etc. Have to try and squeeze 2 cars in there this winter too.

Fire retardant drywall could be used for walls, a blower from a home heating/cooling system moves air great. Make a air filter/spark arrestor using a water tank, and louveres.

Filter and recover/recyle air to save heat, a series of filters
last filter hepa style for clean

I have a wood bench, I may try to build a top or hutch on it and plumb a dust collector like this in there.
http://www.harborfreight.com/13-gallon- ... 31810.html

Think that will work? It will pull 660cfm. Only downside I see is that it pulls 7amps and the larger model pulls 20

That dust collector looks like it wouldn't agree with sparks/hot metal.

It wouldn't' be sucking up directly hot sparks, by the time the dust gets pulled up and through the air I would imagine it to be pretty cool?

Maybe take an idea from the paint booth designs.

Create a negative atmosphere in your work area.

Something like an old bead blasting cabinet or such.

You hook your vacuum system to draw air out of the box, this runs through your pipes and filters before exhausting back into the workshop.

The closed box with the gloves you run your hands into allow manipulation of the workpiece while keeping it all enclosed.

Since your dealing with paint fumes as well your going to need some sort of activated charcoal filtration to handle the organic solvents your producing. Dust etc should not be too much of a factor and if you accumulate the venting from the top with your intake into the structure via a side vent your larger granulated particles should collect under the grate on which you are grinding. Just vacuum them out once in a while.

http://www.asminternational.org/content ... afety5.pdf

Overly technical but the drawings might help.

That is true, but also remember dust is explosive when suspended in air.
Where I work, several years ago they were cleaning duct work. Stirred up some dust, a static spark ignited it and blew out one wall of the building.
That dust collector your showing is probably designed more for wood working.

I was thinking an open booth and have the dust collector suck through the top and put a filter in there such as a hepa air filter or furnace filter.
If it's clean after the filter I can route it to blow up through the bottom?