Michael P.

About a year ago, I retired. My wife and I moved to a 160 year old house in Marietta, Ohio. My major requirement for the shop was that it has a dry large basement for my woodshop.

Though old, this basement pretty well fit the ticket. It's approximately 1200 square feet, divided into two rooms.

When we moved in, there were two light bulbs total for a light source in the basement. So the first thing I contracted out for was to rewire the basement with duplex and quadplex outlets approximately every eight feet on the wall (above bench height), and the installation of about 10 double flourescent lights. 

That worked great for the power and visibility, but my other major requirement, or rather, my wife's other major requirement was that I keep the dust out of the rest of the house. 

So, I did my homework, and found that Oneida made the best dust control equipment for woodshops one can find. I was determined to go top of the line, and when I saw the Dust Gorilla, it became a must have.

Enthusiastically, I ordered the Dust Gorilla, and was as excited as a kid at Christmas, when the eight boxes arrived. I dutifully built a stud wall on which to hang the apparatus, and carefully measured to ensure that I had enough headroom. I had a couple of inches to spare. Life was good.

That is, life was good, until I tried to hang it. It kept bumping into something. The something was a floor joist for the living room. It suddenly dawned on me that I had measured to the bottom of the living room floor, between the joists, and not to the bottom of the joists. The Dust Gorilla was too tall!

I was devastated. I had to have the Dust Gorilla, but what could I do? 

Well, I could move the stud wall, so the top of the Gorilla was between the joists. That would give me enough head space, but it would restrict the airflow to the intake fan, and I didn't want that.

So, I have a rather unique Dust Gorilla. It sits below the joist on the stud wall, but instead of having a 35 gallon drum, it now has about a 16 gallon drum. It's amazing what one can achieve with a sharp knife and duct tape. The only downside is I have to empty the drum a bit more often, but that's proven to be no problem.

As far as performance goes, I love my Dust Gorilla. In the picture, you can see my new workbench that I built out of some 75 bf of hard maple. I'm just putting the finish on it today.

Between sawing, jointing, planing, drilling, chiseling and sanding, I created a few mountains of sawdust, while building this bench over the past several months. I never heard complaint one from my wife about sawdust in the house, and I even used a hose from the Dust Gorilla to suck chips out of the mortises from the upside down benchtop.  It worked wonderfully.

I am now very happy with my well lit, well powered, well equipped, and virtually dust-free shop. Thank you, Oneida.