I am going to have to start back over on the drawing board for my Shapeoko Enclosure and I am wondering has anyone built an enclosure with an air filtration system in the Enclosure ?
The problem I am running into is from my table that the Shapeoko sits on to the ceiling is only 48". My original enclosure design was going to be 24" but then realized 5" is not enough for the vacuum hose. So I need to make it taller. I am noticing many are 36" or taller.
If I took the height to the full 48" available to me what I am thinking is this…could I hang a small WEN 3410 air filtration unit inside the enclosure ? So that it circulates the air in the enclosure ?
You need to admit fresh air for cooling — usually folks do that using a baffle, and given the volume of chips a machine makes, would want normal dust collection to remove chips, so just put the vacuum inside, and vent it out using a baffle system which also admits fresh air.
Regarding heat, not saying this is always the case but I can provide one data point Temperatures (Fun with FLIR). The hottest component in my setup in the vac, it’s not the Shapeoko. I added fans inside my enclosure before realizing this. The fans are handy for keeping dust off the rails, but they are not needed for cooling the Shapeoko.
I would not recommend an air filtration system inside the enclosure, not because it wouldn’t work, but because I don’t think it would really make much of a difference and you would be replacing/cleaning filters constantly. That said I would recommend one outside the enclosure, because dust escapes no matter what you do for dust collection inside the enclosure. And I’m assuming you would also end up sanding parts after CNCing them and the air filtration system outside the enclosure would also help for that scenario.