Being new to CNC I’m not sure how clean the inside of an enclosure will be despite having great airflow to try and get all that fine dust out. So my question is could an enclosure in a small space serve as a dual purpose cnc enclosure / finishing booth for smaller projects to exhaust VOC’s outside your workspace (ie. clear coats, stains, paints, etc…) or is this a recipe for disaster as their will always be finer dust in there and it’ll get onto your projects and ruin the finish. Not talking spay booth/spray on applications but rather applications using brush/rag/etc…
I have mixed feelings about this. The first reaction is along of the line of
but then again on numerous occasions I have poured epoxy in freshly cut parts while they still sat on the wasteboard, in the enclosure, and ended up without any noticeable dust specs on the surface of the epoxy and shiny results.
That’s with a decent dust collection system but otherwise being careless about cleaning the machine between jobs. BUT I should mention that I loathe MDF, so I hardly ever cut it, which means that most of my projects produce nice little heavy chips that fall back quickly and don’t fly around like the nasty cancer-wielding particles that “dust-held-together-by-glue” produces when milled.
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I’d like to avoid using MDF as much as possible but I’m pretty sure some of it will end up getting milled over time. Most likely I’ll just test with scraps on my initial projects and see how the samples turn out. Eventually what I want to end up with is a dedicated dust collector with 2 x 4" hoses going to the enclosure with 1 to a sweepy (or sweepy like attachement) and a second to the main enclosure to evacuate as much of the fines as possible. Ideally I want the fresh air coming in from a wide vent along the front door hinge and exhaust near to bed/worksurface at the back of the cabinet. This way the air/draft should alway be front to back in a downward stream and also via sweepy. If I use this as a finishing booth (assuming it’s feasible) then while applying the finish I’d connect the exhaust hose to a vent/fan going to the outside)
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