more dust collection

Quoted text begins.Stone dust seems benign by comparison.
End of quote.

Edie,

Perhaps I should qualify what I mean by the term "benign."

When dust is concentrated in your enclosed workspace, in the air you are
breathing, it is anything but benign. Once it is sucked out in the open
atmosphere, and dispersed by the wind, then it becomes relatively
bengin, unless of course your neighbors are complaining. So far, my
neighbors have said nothing (knock on wood), and may not even know that
I am doing stone sculpture next to them. Apparently, the dust ejected
from the studio space is much more of a problem for me than for them.

It covers the cars, makes the snow brown, has to be hosed off the
plants. Like you, I'm much more worried about the noise impact on the
neighbors, and keep all the windows (but for one, barely open) and doors
to the outside closed when I'm being very noisy (except for the blower
exhaust, which makes little more than a steady low "rushing" sound
outside), and try to work with grinders and air tools during times when
they are not at home. I like music when I work, and, unlike some of my
neighbors, I also try to keep my musical taste from enforcing itself on
others.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that mostly I try not to be noticed.
I'd much rather be under the radar than plastered all over it. I mean,
if I went next door and told my neighbor that I was going to be carving
stone for a living, making dust and noise at all hours of the day and
night, filling my driveway with big hunks of rock disgorged from big
noisy smelly trucks, if he didn't mind, you can imagine the response.

The whole thing may be easier for me, because currently I live in a
small town, in a semi-rural neighborhood in which people mostly keep to
themselves. In a city center, a whole other set of concerns arise.
You're going to have to get pretty creative with your dust exhaust,
perhaps in some ways that I mentioned in the previous email.

I have had zero luck with standard bag-type dust collectors, which seem
to merely recycle the dust back into the air. I also tried one of those
ones that hang from the ceiling - the box-type with various stages of
filtration, and it was almost instantly overwhelmed by the concentration
of dust I was putting out. I've had it so dusty in the studio that I
could barely see the other side of the 25' room - with the blower
running! So you can imagine how that would choke a box filter. The
only solution I've found is to eject the dust outside, and to point the
exhaust in the least impactful direction possible. The blower I'm using
now, with cross ventilation from one window, can clear the room from
"dense fog" to "clear air" in 2-3 minutes (of course, by then my glasses
are nearly opaque). That is the best I feel I can hope for, without
going totally industrial with giant fans on the roof.

I don't know if this helps. Didn't mean to make this into a
cosmological treatise.

Bill