Shop vac and dust collection cart

I have had my dust collection setup for a while and have found it very useful, although it has been a bit of a challenge moving it around due to the various parts. A shop vac and dust collection cart will solve the problem!

My dust collection setup is comprised of a shop vac and plastic barrel with a plastic “cyclone” cone on top. It works really well for collecting the saw dust in the barrel and greatly reduces the amount of dust in the air of the workshop.

I have quite a lot of white melamine coated chipboard left over from an old dismantled wardrobe. I laid out the shop vac and dust collection barrel to take some measurements and then cut the chipboard to the required dimensions to make a base.

I added some pieces of pallet slats to the base to give me a more substantial material for screws to connect with and then screwed on some swivelling casters, with locks on the front two. This will allow me to easily move the cart around the workshop to wear I need it and mean emptying the barrel when full will be easier too.

I positioned some off-cut blocks around the shop vac to hold it in place and then screwed into them from underneath. This gives me the option of removing the shop vac if I need and I can simply remove or adjust the blocks if I replace or upgrade the shop vac at some point.

I fitted some blocks to hold the barrel in place and then used some thicker pallet pieces from my scrap wood selection to make a vertical divider between the shop vac section and the area for the barrel. This will be used to wrap up both the hose and the mains lead for the shop vac to keep the workshop tidy when not in use.

I added the shop vac and the dust collection barrel onto the cart and then plugged in the hoses again and wound up the mains lead. The cart will be very useful and has already allowed me to quickly manoeuvre tools and workshop furniture around to deal with different sizes of material for projects. Plus having it on wheels is always useful, as I keep changing the layout of the workshop depending on the size of my current workpiece! 🔨