Why Dust Collection is Overrated

Before I get to the dust collection commentary, let me update you on the Poker Chip Trays.  I spent another 2 hours tonite and drilled out the last blank and started gluing them up. Here is where I am so far, about 3.5 hours in. 4 trays are glued up and 2 more are waiting for the final assembly.



OK, so much for the update. In making these, I used the bandsaw, the tablesaw and the drill press. I hook up a shop vac to my bandsaw when i am using it, and it does a pretty good job of collecting the dust. Here is what was produced from this operation:



The table saw was used to crosscut the racks to length and to clean up the bandsawn edges. I didnt bother to hook up my shop vac to the dust bag i have underneath the tablesaw. Here is the dust it created.



not bad huh? That leaves only the drill press. I have seen some god-awful rig-ups that people use for collecting dust from drill presses and lathes, but they seem clumsy at best. I bet in most shops WITH full blown dust collection the drill press is not connected to the central system. So while a fully plumbed dust collection system would have saved me the "hassle" of cleaning up the mess in the two pictures above, it would have done me no good cleaning this up:




are you kidding me? for reference, the base of that drill press is 4" tall. Here's some interesting math--i drilled 15 holes 1 5/8" in diameter ~2 1/4" deep. Thats a total of 70 cubic inches of material, which is just over a liter.

I learned 2 things building these trays.

1) it doesnt take a lot of material to make a really big mess (1L of wood = that big ass pile, which filled up my 5 gallon shop vac.)

2) Dust collection would have saved me about 2 seconds of clean up on this particular job.

My Friends Are Dorks

I have a few friends (more than a few, actually) who are avid poker players. The recent popularity of televised Hold-em tournaments has only served to further fuel their passion for the game. They play a regular game every other Wednesday. Over the years, the game has gotten more and more sophisticated and we (royal we, I mean they) are now to the point where custom tables are being purchased and a dedicated gaming hall is being built at a friends place of business.

I had this piece of scrap left over from the pictureframe project and didnt know what I was going to do with it. It is basically an 8' bubinga 2x4.



I had thought to make it into another smaller frame, but there really wasnt enough stock to do anything or reasonable size. I stumbled across a picture of a poker chip rack on TWW and thought chip trays would be a great use of this scrap. Google quiclky turned up a design similar to Marc's.

Since the process for making them is already laid out, I will not repeat it here. I will say that my goal was to make 3 sets in 2 hours and this is how far I got.



The most time consuming part of this whole thing is drilling the large holes that comprise the channels in each tray. I bet I spent an hour doing just that and I still have one more group to go. I also have a very large pile of bubinga shavings around the base of my drill press.

I plan to complete them this evening. I'll let you know the total time to complete - it's a good quick project for your friends who love poker. I'm sure you have some.