It is powered by a decent shop vac running through a cheap cyclone dust separator. Piping is just 50 mill drain pipe, plumbing fittings and flexible vacuum hose.
The jewel in the dusty crown is the manifold which I put together quite simply. This allows me to direct the suction to the tool manually very simply and without loss of suction. One blast gate centrally located instead of many. It is simply a box with four i inlet holes, a well-fitting MDF sliding gate, and a box with one outlet pipe.
Obviously the dusty tools have to be located close together for this to be practical, but it’s a great system and by capturing dust close to the source we have very little dust problem in the workshop. In three years I have never needed to empty the shop vac and we don’t use a shop air filter.
I expect some people will make a noise about static electricity, microfine dust and HEPA filters and so on. I know about this and in an industrial setup would address these issues. We do have and use P3 masks while hand sanding and other operations. But for my small but busy repair shop, i’ve deemed this adequate.
