Day: April 6, 2019

My garage is sort of orga­nized, but it’s cov­ered in dust. I knew it was get­ting bad and so I ordered a rel­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive air fil­ter for shop spaces. I’d had my eye on the WEN 3410 3‑speed air fil­ter for a while. Home Depot has the best price for this item, but it’s rou­tine­ly out-of-stock. It came back in stock in Feb­ru­ary so I ordered one then. It arrived, I plugged it up just to make sure it worked, and then it sat on my work­bench for the past 6 weeks or so.

I had pur­chased the nec­es­sary hang­ing hard­ware a cou­ple of weeks lat­er, but still did­n’t get around to hang­ing it up. You see, our garage has real­ly high ceil­ings (12′-6″) and the dinky 12″ chains that are packed in the box weren’t going to cut it. The instruc­tions state to hang it at least 7′ above the floor, but I’m pret­ty sure 11′ in the air isn’t going to cap­ture a lot of dust. I pur­chased some pre-punched angle and about 20′ of 300lb chain. But still, this all sat on the work­bench (ok, so maybe my garage is less orga­nized than I’d like…).

So, today I final­ly decid­ed it would the be the day to install this thing. And appar­ent­ly none too soon. My son want­ed to go over to his friend’s house but told me he did­n’t want to ride his bike because it was cov­ered in dust (he’s not wrong, but we got it down and aired the tires anyway).

So the angle I pur­chas­es was a 4′ sec­tion, and I need­ed to cut it in half. I also bought a cut­ting wheel for my angle grinder. This was actu­al­ly the first time I’d ever cut steel with an angle grinder. I did wear a full face shield but did­n’t cov­er my arms. The sparks were min­i­mal, but I would­n’t want­ed to have cut sev­er­al that way. I could have uses the same cut­ting wheel to cut the chains to length, but my bolt cut­ter was faster.

After that, it was just a mat­ter of get­ting the angles lag screwed into the ceil­ing joists. I used some thread­ed quick links to attach the chains, just in case the unit start­ed swing­ing around. That proved to not be a prob­lem. Frankly, this was prob­a­bly all overkill to hang a 31 lb unit, but it’s room to grow if I need some­thing bigger.

I had to add an exten­sion cord to get it plugged into the same out­let as my garage door open­er and my retractable exten­sion cord­By the way, the retractable exten­sion cord is one of the sin­gle best items I’ve got­ten for my shop. Between that and my rolling work­bench, it feels like hav­ing a whole new shop area.. Then it was ready to test. Admit­ted­ly, this isn’t a very pow­er­ful air fil­ter. At full speed, it’s 400 cfm. For­tu­nate­ly, that’s not enough to get it mov­ing hang­ing from hose 4′-6″ chains.

I don’t yet have much of a sense of how well it works, but it gets pret­ty good reviews. I’ll put it to the test soon enough by tak­ing my air com­pres­sor to start blow­ing dust off of everything.