How Did You Design the Dust Collection for Your Miter Saw Station?

At the furniture company we had a 4" come down and the dust went begging the miter saw. Worked okay and at he end of the day I just pushed it all over to the 4" pipe.

I think the major problem with dust collection on a miter saw has to do with the incompatibility of a traditional dust collector and the miter saw itself. A large impeller dust collector is designed to move a high volume of air but at a low pressure. That means it'll pick up fine dust well, but chips and course dust is harder for it to move. To pick up those larger, heavier pieces, shop tools that produce that type of debris tend to have confined cabinets and directional air flow. Think of a cabinet style table saw. There's limited air inlet (usually the throat on the table) and the cabinet is sealed up to discourage unwanted airflow. The idea is that the chip production occurs between (and in line with) the air inlet and the dust port. This maximizes the airflow in the area the chips are produced for the best extraction,

Miter saws don't (can't) do that since, by nature, they're an unconfined tool. So, in order to overcome this shortfall, one either needs to collect and direct the chips into a very focused area for the low pressure to be able to collect it, or the vacuum pressure needs to be highly increased.

Since building my high pressure DC system (Oneida Supercell) my dust collection woes at the miter saw have been greatly reduced…even with no modifications to the saw itself.

Without that high pressure, I think the only real way to get better collection from a miter saw is with dramatic funneling of the debris into the mouth of the DC pipe/hose. Unfortunately, the width of the funnel to collect all those chips creates an awful wide inlet for even a large impeller DC to move enough air to collect the fine dust as well.

I don't want to say it's impossible to do, but I think 'good' dust collection on a miter saw, using a traditional dust collector, is just really hard to accomplish.

For dust collection, I somewhat copied this for dust collection.



The dust ended up blowing out the front between the vinyl curtain. So I added a 1 1/2" hose at the miter saw dust port and fed through a 2" hole on the side and attached the hose to the side of the work station. Then I hooked up a shop-vac to that hose when using the miter saw. This eliminated about 70% of the dust. When I added a 2 1/2" under the front of the vinyl curtain to the dust collector. It eliminated 95% of the saw dust when I used both the 1 1/2" and 2 1/2" collection points at the same time. Now I don't get any saw dust on the floor or blown at me



I should have made it wider, like in the first picture. You can see the 1 1/2" white tube comes out to attach shop-vac. And where the 2 1/2" hose tube goes in.

The was version 1. I've since modified the doors to go down lower. 1HP wall mount blower exhausted out side. Works well, not as good for miter cuts and wide boards.

First, I chose a simple compound miter saw to minimize the size of the enclosure. I built a mobile stand with flip up wings as I didn't want to dedicate an entire wall to a miter station. The 5 sided hopper reduces turbulence and chips bouncing back but the real key to success is the 6" duct and 3hp collector. The front face flat shield was intended for 90 deg cuts only but rarely gets used, it's not really needed.