Shopsmith Forums

Wondering if anyone has tried the Oneida Dust Deputy on their shopsmith vacuum. Looks like it might be a nice way to eliminate having to remove and clean the the dust out of the big white bag so often. I seen an ad for one in the American Woodworker magazine this month and watched the video. Any comments?

bergdahl wrote:Wondering if anyone has tried the Oneida Dust Deputy on their shopsmith vacuum. Looks like it might be a nice way to eliminate having to remove and clean the the dust out of the big white bag so often. I seen an ad for one in the American Woodworker magazine this month and watched the video. Any comments?

I have used it on both a Craftsman wet/dry shopvac and on my DC3300. Works very well on the shopvac, preventing the filter from clogging up within a few minutes of typical woodworking use.

On the DC3300, I tried it to see whether it would turn the DC3300 into a 2 stage collector, eliminating larger chips from being sucked through the impeller. It worked, but it seemed to really reduce the efficiency of the collection by the DC3300 so I have given it up and now try to avoid picking up anything but dust with the DC3300.

bergdahl wrote:Wondering if anyone has tried the Oneida Dust Deputy on their shopsmith vacuum. Looks like it might be a nice way to eliminate having to remove and clean the the dust out of the big white bag so often. I seen an ad for one in the American Woodworker magazine this month and watched the video. Any comments?

I use it all of the time with my shopvac. Works as advertised. I don't have to empty the shopvac, just the Dust Deputy. I didn't purchase the whole kit; I just attached the top to a 5 gallon bucket I already had. A word of warning is that with the hoses attached it is a little top heavy. I initially solved the problem with a couple of bricks in the bottom of the bucket. I now have the bricks in the bottom of a second bucket into which I have set the Dust Deputy bucket. Not as tippy. When I get some time, I'd like to build a little cart on wheels for both the shopvac and Dust Deputy that I can move around without tipping over.

Thanks for your reply. I was hoping to get some feedback on how it works with the Shopsmith DC3300 vacuum. Have you tried it that way? Thanks.

bergdahl wrote:Thanks for your reply. I was hoping to get some feedback on how it works with the Shopsmith DC3300 vacuum. Have you tried it that way? Thanks.

You original post was a little vague about whether you were referring to using the Dust Deputy on a Shopsmith brand vacuum (Shopsmith made one of these, years back) or the Shopsmith dust collector, DC3300. The DC3300 isn't a vacuum, doesn't create the static pressure of a vacuum, and you will probably shorten the life of the impeller if you use it like a shop vac to pick up anything and everything that falls on the shop floor.

Now that I know you are interested in using the Dust Deputy on the DC3300, let me elaborate on my ealier post. I have the Dust Deputy (i bought it when the only dust control in my shop was a Craftsman wet/dry vac) and I have tried the Dust Deputy on my DC3300. In my opinion, it decreased the sawdust collection efficiency of the DC3300 by starving it for air, slowing down air velocity or both.

This is based on my observation of the inflation level of the DC3300's upper filter bag with and without the Dust Deputy in line. I have the 42 inch filter hood on the DC3300. With no Dust Deputy, the DC3300 filter bag fully inflates when the DC3300 is turned on. With the Dust Deputy in line, the DC3300 filter bag looked like it could use a little ... ahem ... Viagra....

The Dust Deputy was primarily designed to prevent the clogging of small shop vac filters, which have small surface areas that will rapidly clog with relatively modest amounts of sawdust to the point where you get little or no suction after a few minutes of serious sawdust collection. When used with a shop vac, the Dust Deputy works very well, doesn't decrease suction noticably (those vacuums create much more static pressure than the DC3300) and the suction level is maintained for a longer period of time as the majority of the dust, chips, shavings and even the odd nail or screw will drop into the cyclone and never clog you shop vac filter.

Because of the much larger surface area on the DC3300 filter bags, loss of air flow from sawdust just isn't a problem -- at least not until the lower collection bag is nearly full of sawdust. In fact, the filters of the DC3300 are actually are designed to work better with a little dust, by which I mean that they only reach their full, rated efficiency for particulate filtering after they build up an internal dust cake; so dust inside the DC3300 filter is a good thing whereas dust in your shop vac filter is a bad thing.

The only reason I tried the Dust Deputy on the DC3300 was to try to get the wood chips on my shop floor to drop out of the air flow before they hit the plastic impeller inside the DC3300. The Dust Deputy will do this for the DC3300, but at a cost of less effective sawdust collection and the trade off wasn't working for me, although your mileage may vary.

The solution for me has been to hook up the Dust Deputy to a shop vac and use that to get the bigger chips and small cut offs that would bang around inside the DC3300 and to use the DC3300 to collect sawdust and light weight shavings, which is what the DC3300 is designed for.

Best of luck,

Al

Thanks for your response! Exactly the feedback I was hoping for.

When using the Dust Deputy with something like a ShopVac, where do the heavy chips collect? In the ShopVac or in the in line canister. I wiuld have thought in the canister until I watched a uTube video that seems to say otherwise (though they did not vacuum up any heavy stuff).

Dusty,

The Dust Deputy get's everything but a maybe a tiny bit of very fine dust. I have sucked up a pencil (my defense - it was buried in a pile of sawdust), large bits of wood and large engine blocks. Naw, I was fibbing on the last item. But everything else just winds up in the Dust deputy. It has worked great on my ShopVac. Well worth it IMHO.

bobgroh wrote:Dusty,

The Dust Deputy get's everything but a maybe a tiny bit of very fine dust. I have sucked up a pencil (my defense - it was buried in a pile of sawdust), large bits of wood and large engine blocks. Naw, I was fibbing on the last item. But everything else just winds up in the Dust deputy. It has worked great on my ShopVac. Well worth it IMHO.

I don't get it.

If everything ends up in the same (Dust Deputy) bucket, what is the other bucket (ShopVac or DC3300) for?

What would end up in the DC3300 collection bag?

From the Dust Deputy web site:

"The Dust Deputy® will filter 99% of sanding dust, with only 1% going into the vacuum."

Presumably the DC3300 would only collect a small amount of very fine dust, so maybe you'd only have to empty the DC3300 bag once for every 99 times you empty the Dust Deputy bucket.

Gary