As per the last meeting of the woodshop committee I’m posting a vote for a Fesstool CT 25 Dust Extractor. Vote closes Tuesday March 26.
The dust extractor will be used to collect dust from hand held power tools like random orbit sanders, belt sanders, the Domino, (if the vote passes) and any other handheld power tool that is equipped with a dust port. We will need to 3D print adapters for non-Fesstool equipment.
I vote no because we have done no measurement of our shop vac’s ability to filter dust out of the air when hooked up to hand tools. Seems like this is expected to perform better because the specs have bigger numbers, but I have no way knowing if we need a higher specced product without data showing the current vacs are not good enough in our shop.
Stephen, we have this Rigid shop vac that we recently purchased for hot crafts and the kitchen, it’s rated at 144 CFM, actually higher than the Festool at 140 CFM. It’s also only $125.
The only two things that make me consider that the Festool may be better are noise and static pressure.
The Festool states it can pull 96" of static water column, the rigid doesn’t specify, but we have one, and could rig up a quick test to measure it.
And for noise, neither publish noise levels, which is unfortunate.
For a quiet vacuum I recommend investigating dewalts stealthsonic line. But yes I think it’s worthwhile to try to figure out are these tools already meeting our minimum requirements. We all know dust in the shop is a problem, but I don’t think we have proven a link between that and our current hand tool dust collection capability.