I ran a straight section of 4” ducting over my table saw and dropped it down behind my garage door opener motor. I used two 45 degree fittings to make my 90 degree turn down. I would have liked to drop down further but I didn’t want my lowest point of the run to be any lower than the height of my garage door. To get the rest of the way down I dropped a 4” flex duct I got from Penn State Industries (part #D08C). Having 13 foot tall ceiling screwing the strapping into the ceiling to hang the ducting was a lot of fun. To hang the ducting and to attach the ducting to the wall around the shop I used perforated metal hanger straps (Home Depot #3/4HS)
To connect to the table saw I friction fit a 4” to 2-1/2” reducer fitting (Woodcraft #85U65) into a scrap piece of ¼” MDF. I screwed this into the backside of the table saw; on the other side of the fitting I connected a 2-1/2” flex hose to the dust connection port on my Ridgid table saw. I would prefer this connection be 4” all the way but with the way the connection is under the blade there is not enough clearance to do this.
You can also see the other leg of the dust collection running to my miter saw. For this I used straight pipe and a pair of 4” 45 degree elbows. To connect to the miter saw I put a 4” blast gate at the end of the run and connected flex hose to a 4” to 1” multi-step reducer dust collection fitting (Woodcraft #151193) that I cut down to go into a 2” flexible plumbing coupler (Home Depot #P1056-22). The other end of the coupler is clamped to the back of the miter saw
The leg that runs off to the other side of the shop connects around to my mobile cart with my drill press and bandsaw mounted on it. In order to accomplish this I ran 4” PVC line around the corner of the shop and then turned it down right about the top of the pegboard using two 4” 45 degree fittings again. I wanted to be able to keep the pegboard and not have a 4” pipe run down the wall (again everything needs to be able to be pushed out of the way) so I chose to reduce the run down to 2” PVC and run it behind the pegboard in the stud cavity. In order to do this I used a rubber 4” to 2” plumbing reducer (Home Depot #P1056-42), after the reducer the 2” PVC pipe runs behind the pegboard and stops just below the bottom of the pegboard. From here I used another 2” flexible plumbing coupler and connected the end of the PVC pipe to a 10-ft section of 2-1/2” flex hose. The 2-1/2” flex house has 2-1/2” hose end fittings (Woodcraft #128685) on each end. I wanted to keep the flex hose on the end long so I could roll the cart away from the wall and not be limited to how far I could go. Also, this length of hose allows me to be able to clean off the workbench and even connect the flex hose to my downdraft sanding box, a handheld sander or even the dust collection port on my router.
Next part will be conclusion