Shop Talk

The Most Sophisticated Filtration System Ever

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    In any variety of wood construction, fabrication, demolition or etc, the presence, or rather, the nuisance, of wood dust is inevitable. Wood dust is nothing short of despicable. It is the ultra tiny, generally microscopic wood debris that floats elegantly into the air with every cut, sand, plunge or etc, and, like a malicious smoke monster, alights on everything within the wind’s radius from your tool, your tool’s innards, your materials and working environment, to your own physical body.
     

    This fine wood debris might make you cough and sneeze, it might make your eyes water and your mouth dry, and it will assuredly fatigue your tools and continue accumulating inside them until the tool itself ceases to properly function. As such, once these little suckers begin to mingle with the air around us, they can become the truest kind of disaster and are all but impossible to remove or eliminate from your environment. 

    Wood dust has also been associated with a lot more than the sniffles or clogging-up your power tools. In fact, it can make you sick. Exposure to wood dust can lead to a handful of detrimental health effects from respiratory complications to dermatitis and even cancer.

    The best way to deal with dust is to minimize your, and your power tools’, exposure to it. The best way to do that is to catch the debris at its source – to eliminate it at its point of generation using a HEPA filter dust extractor
    and, thus, preventing it from socializing with your atmosphere and, double thus, compromising your comfort, your cleanliness, and the integrity of your power tools. Using a HEPA (High Efficiency Particulate Air) filter eliminates nearly every single particle produced capturing 99.997% of wood dust (as small as 0.3 microns) before the rascals can even consider dissipating into your environment. Ultimately, the HEPA filter captures virtually everything that passes through it without any reduction to airflow ensuring suction remains always optimal. 

    To provide a better idea of just how small a micron is, it is literally one millionth of a meter. It is the microscopic length you end-up with when you divide a meter into one million pieces. The width of the eye of a needle is about 1,200 of them, a strand of human hair has a width of approximately 100 microns, and the human eye can’t see objects smaller than thirty microns. So, I’ll reiterate now for emphasis that the HEPA filter captures 99.997% of all debris as small as 0.3 microns, captures 99.997% percent of debris smaller than a fraction of one millionth of a meter. 

    So, where would such a tremendous filter come from? Let me tell you: during the development of the first nuclear weapons, the HEPA filter was evolved by the Atomic Energy Commission to filter radioactive dust particles from the ensuing exhaust. A perfect conglomeration of randomly arranged and usually fiberglass fibers comprise the filter, and using a suction, dust particles are forced to enter the filter where they unfailingly adhere to said fibers. Since then, and despite their seemingly rudimentary design, HEPA filters have remained the most effective, most trusted filtration system commercially available. Used in the most sensitive environments from medical care to specialized manufacturing, there is, literally, no better filtration system presently available. In other words, in the form of the most optimized filtration device ever developed, there was, at least, one good thing that resulted from the production of the atomic bomb.

    In the end, for your personal health and safety, for the longevity and continued high-performance of your power tools, for the best results and cleanest environments, and because the filter was trusted to capture the radioactive waste produced during the construction of nuclear weapons, you need a HEPA filter dust extractor. As the most sophisticated, specialized filtration system ever developed, you need a HEPA filter dust extractor, and because regulations against our exposure to dust particles will only become more and more rigid, you really do need a HEPA filter dust extractor.