SawStop Overarm Dust Collection - Take 3

Like many other SawStop owners out there I really liked the idea of SawStop's Overarm Dust Collection accessory, but I didn't like the price tag as much - $200 for a little bit of hose and some pipe does seem steep. Once again, this idea was heavily inspired by Paul-Marcel's design at halfinchshy.com, though I did end up making a few changes.

I decided to use 1.5" EMT, which I picked up at my local big-box home improvement store. They had it in 10' sections, but they cut a 10' piece into 3 pieces for me - approximately 3', 2.5' and 4.5'. I also picked up 2 elbows and several compression fittings. The 3' section is on the bottom, closest to the table, and the 2.5' section is up top. The vertical portion comes from joining the elbows into a U, which you can see from the location of the compression fittings.

I really liked what Paul-Marcel did with the star knobs to be able to loosen and swing the arm down out of the way. I didn't really want to do a wooden box to hold the EMT though - I really wanted to come up with a metal bracket solution.

My first thought was to take some metal corner braces and bolt those to the rear rail, then bolt in some EMT hangers to the corner braces. That worked, and I don't think it was going to go anywhere, but the corner braces simply weren't heavy enough and the whole thing wanted to wobble around a lot.

My next step was to mount a piece of slotted angle steel (like you might use to hang a garage door track) to the rear rail using the existing bolt locations. Then I mounted the EMT hangers to that. This was much better, and actually quite stable, but it put the end of  the EMT too close to the table - when I had the hose hooked up that comes up from the dust collector it sat a little bit above the table surface. That wasn't going to work since it would interfere with cuts.

Third time is a charm... had I spent a little longer in the conduit section the first time around I might have found these the first time, but oh well. My third plan ended up using conduit beam clamps. I mounted the EMT hangers to these and they are SOLID. Not only is the whole setup nice and rigid now, but it also sits back just far enough from the rail to not get in the way of any cuts, which is of course very important.

You can see the beam clamps are quite heavy and hold the EMT in place just fine.
You can also see that I've been making cuts without dust collection at the blade guard!

 

The hose that runs from the EMT to the blade guard is a section of pool hose, just as others have used. I found it for about $9 at a local pool supply store with the ends attached already.

I did add a light (LED) to the arm as well. It is pretty well positioned for use above my router table add-on, but not as great for the table saw. I may add a boom arm before too long and suspend another fixture from that for the saw.

Now that I think I have a setup here that is going to do the job I need to make a couple small enhancements just to make things a little easier:

1) Clean up the wire for the light
2) Add some star knobs (or similar) to allow tool-less loosening of the EMT hangers for swinging the arm down out of the way.