Radial Arm Saw Dust Collection

Here you can see the very simple box collector that I built for my RAS. The box is built from aluminum sheet metal. You could use galvanized if you preferred. This material is sold as roof valley flashing at the home centers. It is easily bent using pieces of scrap wood to help define the corners. You can see the hole at the bottom where I connected my 4" dust collection fitting. The box corners have 3/4" flanges bent around the corner and secured using pop rivets.

Here you can see the DC piping connected to the bottom of the box. I chose to mount the box to the wall behind the saw rather than to the saw itself. The box extends 2 - 3" below the saw table and I think it could be improved by adding a front lip to the box up to almost the level of the saw table. This can grab most of the dust produced by the saw, and it's pretty cool to see the air flow swirl the dust around and down into the pipe. My DC is only a 650 CFM unit so bigger units should work even better.

I'm very pleased with the way this works. Before I had this in place the dust simply blasted against the wall behind the saw and ended up in a big pile behind and under the saw where it was most difficult to get cleaned up. By locating the box next to the saw pillar, the dust is directed into the box even when making miter cuts. Obviously it won't work when ripping, something I never do on this tool anyway. This should work just as well for miter saws too.