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Hesh

In a discussion recently I think crazymanmichael mentioned making one, so he probably knows how to do it.

RussellR38950.4778240741

Sorry Hesh I found this that shows how to make one

billpentz.com/woodworking/Downdraft.html

I know that Todd Rose has built one, maybe he'll chime in...

the "table" i made was a portable plywood box, pegboard top, with a 4" hose fitting, run in conjunction with a side hood with vacuum for both supplied by my dust collector. it works fairly well, but you still need a mask/respirator, particularly if the sander being used does not have a dust collection port. using the porter cable ros hooked to the fein shopvac, and running the air cleaner and the dust collector, the vast majority of the dust is captured, but certainly not all of it.

I took a tour of the Santa Cruz Guitar Co. last spring and was surprised to see that thier downdraft table had big holes (about 3/4" or maybe even 1"). I asked about it and they said they started with regular pegboard but it limited the air flow too much. The bigger hole did a better job.

Steve Spodaryk bought one of those portable Delta downdraft tables on sale at Rockler last year, and built it into a nice workbench/cabinet. Works very well, and the price is reasonable. I've seen them at Lowes too.

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"I want to know what kind of pickups Vince Gill uses in his Tele, because if I had those, as good of a player as I am, I'm sure I could make it sound like that.
Only badly."

I turned a section of an existing workbench into a dwondraft table. It works fairly well (although it doesn't capture all the dust). I built a 4" deep box under the 3/4" plywood benchtop, added a 4" plastic dust collection hood to the bottom, glued a thin rubber sheet (pan liner from Home Depot) to the top (so I don't scratch the wood), then cut 1" holes through the benchtop on 2" centers. It's connected to the 4" dust collection header that runs around my shop.

Here is a shot of my setup. The cabinet provides a very solid base, and some much needed storage. The downdraft is the Delta model, which is virtually identical to the Grizzly (expect for the color).

I have the small Oneida cyclone. Plenty of suction. Excellent for hand sanding and using the PC rand-orbit. With this setup, there is no dust in the air - just the noise from the sander and cyclone to deal with.

I'd be interested in hearing how effective they are. It seems that Bill has the most authoritative articles, but it seems that it takes an aweful lot of machine to do a decent job. Better more than less I suppose...

Hesh,

My home-built looks a lot like Terry's and I have the same reservations about it. I hook it up to my 1 1/2 hp jet dc, and it works pretty well. My RAS has its own dust collector which works better if it's hooked up to my shopvac. I think I'd get improved results if I were to taper the pegboard holes. It makes a big difference if I cover the unused area of the sanding table, which leads me to believe that my dc is at its limit in this application.

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now known around here as Pat Foster
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http://www.patfosterguitars.com