Shopsmith Forums

There have been many negative comments made about using MDF. I agree with most of them most of the time; however, I must say that I have had a very favorable encounter with MDF.

It is a high quality cherry veneer. An in-law who owned/operated a cabinet shop decided to retire and I was the beneficiary of a stack of 8' long 1x12 planks (that are just a bit under 3/4" thick). It mills beautifully and finished just as nicely. Given another furniture project to build, I will use this despite the dust. I'll just have to discipline myself to turn on the dust collector.
Because of the thickness, this stuff is also ideal for jigs to be used on the Shopsmith. It fits perfectly in the miter slots.

Good score! I have some similar "wood" in my stash. If at all possible I machine it in the yard while wearing my Trend Air Shield!

That is a great score...
I don't use a lot of it but have no major qualms about using it. I do consider myself very lucky to have reached my age of 75 and still be breathing considering all of the extremely dusty conditions I have worked in over the years.
In the old days any exposure that did not kill you right away was usually considered just part of the job. I always considered sawdust to be one of the lesser evils that I sucked into my lungs. On the farm I have worked in all kinds of dust, many now considered ultra toxic, from a very young age. We also had sawdust on the farm but it tended to be coarser and often outdoors. We didn't have a lot of materials like MDF but in the 1950's we did use a good bit of Masonite, Celotex and some Homasote. In the 1940's and the early 1950's asbestos was in quite common use on farms as house siding, wall panels in barns and it was a really common roof panel on things like hog houses etc where moisture was a problem. I breathed in my share... I was just a kid who did what was ordered.
Did you ever drive down the road and see a tractor or combine working in a huge cloud of dust that was so thick that you couldn't really see through it? That was me working in that from age 9... Dust mask or respirator? What is that?
I worked everyday in some kind of dust. One of my primary jobs was grinding the feed for hogs and cattle, always in a dense cloud of hammer mill feed dust. I couldn't begin to say how many tons of dusty grain I scooped out of grain bins over the years (My back knows ). Barn dust, fertilizer dust, hay dust... Airborne ag chemicals, anhydrous ammonia exposure... Some years there were outbreaks of various field blights, molds or damaged grain that was prone to bin spoilage... Later came leather dust, drywall dust
Like I said, I consider myself lucky to still be breathing... Today most of us are a little smarter than we use to be. Of course in those old days home wood shops almost never had any kind of dust collection or air scrubbing. Coming from that period I was slow to move to protection. These days I'm much quicker to use the dust collectors and I am working on an air scrubber. I've used a box fan with a furnace filter but I want to build something much more effective on the almost invisible dust. With the wood shop in the basement it is more than my own lungs that need protecting.
I have not been in a large cabinet shop since MDF use has gotten so common, I wonder if many of them have made special provisions for the MDF dust and just what they have done.
I guess I should do some Google looking.


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On my last project I used Pressure Sensitive Adhesive (PSA) veneer over 3/4" MDF. First time I tried veneers but everything came out great. Greatly simplifies the build and allows for some very exotic wood types at a reasonable price.