Another Tip: Re-purposing in Lieu of Discarding

Things we throw away from the workshop are unusable scrap material, saw dust (although I keep some as spill absorbents), rags, etc. The motor on this one of two Fein shop vacs I own burned out a while back.  I threw the motor assembly and cover but kept the bottom canister. For a while it was a trash can at the corner of the shop. Then I decided to do something with it, sort of re-purposing it for a somewhat related function.

I was going to use it as an intermediate stage canister with a cyclone dust separator. I purchased online a cheap version of a separator at half the cost.

I cut a circle from a piece of 1/2 inch plywood, lightly larger than the diameter of the top of the canister.

Drilled a 3-inch hole at the center.

Installed the cyclone separator

The wheeled canister adds a lot of convenience and a long hose even more so, when attached to tools with dust extraction.

This system prolongs the life of the vacuum motor because very little dust actually goes through the vacuum filter since much of the dust, specially the heavier ones, drops to the canister while only lighter dust and air go all the way to the separate vacuum cleaner.

Simple Tip for Joining Wide Boards

I needed a wide board for a project. Not wanting to cut the piece from a bigger board, I decided to join a couple of pieces lying around. There are commercial jigs or tools to make the joinery, i.e. biscuit joiner or the special Festool Domino, or pocket hole joinery.  If one does not have any of those, a table saw alone will do.

First step is to create a groove on both pieces to be joined. It's critical, of course, that the groove should be perfectly centered at each edge of the boards. The easy way is to use an ordinary saw blade. Set the height to about 3/16 inch. Eye ball the blade to the center of the edge. Run the board one way, then flip it around, so the other flat edge that was away from the fence is now against it. This insures that the groove is perfectly centered. The final groove could be slightly wider but that is fine.

Now, you can rip the rib that will be sandwiched between the the edges. I keep a lot of ripped pieces at the scrap heap and sure enough I found one. I cut it to the right width (3/8 inch), applied glue to the grooves and the rest is normal glue up. 

This is going to be a strong joint without any special jig or tool, other than the table saw.