One of the constant battles that any woodworker should be fighting is keeping the air quality of the shop as clean as possible. When it is warmer than 60 degrees outside, I typically have the garage door open, so I have pretty good air circulation going on.
However, I do work as much as I can during the cold months, so the shop is closed up. As I am working in the shop, even when using dust collection, quite a bit of dust does get airborne. So to help this out, I recently purchased a used Grizzly air filter via Craigslist. It appeared that the previous owner used it on a shelf as the ceiling mounts for it were long gone. However,
I did want to mount this to ceiling in my shop so that I could get the best possible air circulation in the shop. The cabinet of the filter did have mounting holes, so I got some measurements, and I constructed a bracket from a pine board I had laying around. The bracket actually serves two purposes. First it allowed me to make sure I was able to mount it securely to the ceiling joist, as well as spacing the filter far enough from the ceiling so that it wouldn’t interfere with opening the clips that hold the filters in place. The
cross pieces are attached simply with pocket screws. I then found where the ceiling joists were, and attached the bracket with screws into those joists. With some help lifting the filter to the ceiling, using screws and washers, I attached the filter to the bracket.
Whenever I am running any machinery, including the dust collectors, I keep the air filter running. I do notice that it does circulate the air in the shop very effectively, and it does seem the air is cleaner. As I said, this is still an ongoing battle to keep the air in my shop as clean as possible, and I do have plans to expand on my dust collection even further. I will write about those as well.