 In this video I'm going to show you how I made this awesome dust hood for my miter saw and it's got some really cool features. Let's do it! The first thing to do before we can start building the dust cabinet is to determine how big it needs to be. You can see here that I've mocked up with some cardboard strips about how big I want the footprint to be and about how big I want the dust hood portion of it to be. Now I already went ahead and made my measurements and so I know what I need for the plans. If you're interested in seeing specifically how I measure the saw to determine the measurements and how big I wanted to make it, I'll have a separate video on my website that shows just that process. But for now let's get started on building it. I went ahead and cut out all the necessary parts needed to make the dust drawer and the downdraft portion of the cabinet. I'm actually going to start by assembling the drawer because it'll help in laying out the downdraft table portion of it next. I'm just going to use wood glue and brad nails to hold this together. With the drawer done I can now start working on the downdraft box and I've got the bottom over here, the back and the two sides and I'm going to go ahead and glue and nail those on as well. Now I'm going to go ahead and take the drawer, make sure that fits and with the drawer in place I can take this separator piece which is going to separate the downdraft portion back here from the dust box and I'm going to give a little bit of clearance in there just in case some dust gets in there to make sure the drawer can always close and then glue and nail that in place. Before I bring the top over I'm going to get a measurement of where the downdraft box is and that way I can mark it on the top. There's a couple of things we need to do to the top before we can fasten it to the rest of the base and one of those is to make the downdraft table portion and that's going to be back here above that box that we built down below. So staying behind this line and inside the perimeter I'm going to drill a whole bunch of 3-8 inch holes all over the place. I'm going to do about two inches apart for each hole so I'm going to mark those out and drill those all in. The next thing I need to do to the top is cut out a hole for the dust from the blade to fall down into our dust drawer. So if we take a look underneath the saw you can see it's all wide open and I can see the blade right here. So any sawdust that comes flying off of here will come out through the bottom of the base and then pass through the hole in the top and fall down into the dust drawer. So it looks like if I mark out this circle from the outside and then cut that hole a little bit smaller that should give us a pretty good clearance for dust to fall into our drawer. So that'll be our hole and I'm not going to want to pass this line because that's where our divider is on the inside. So we'll cut this portion out. Just double checking here and realize that I actually don't want the hole to go behind the back of the drawer and the back of the drawer is 13 inches from the front. So I'm going to move this center point of my circle back to here. So for some reason on my saw there's this opening in the front and I don't really know what it's for but it is open to my dust drawer you can see. So in order to close that off and get more of the dust in the drawer instead of out the front I'm going to reuse this piece that I made on my previous dust hood and it just slides in here and I'll screw it down to the top and it pushes up against the insides of the castings and that helps to close off that cavity and prevent dust from coming out the front. With that hole cut out I can go ahead and get this attached. The last thing to do on this lower portion of the cabinet is to drill a couple of holes for some dust collection piping. I'm going to have a two inch pipe come up through here and that's going to connect to the back of the miter saw with some of this shot back hose and then also underneath on the bottom I'm going to have another port for providing the vacuum to the downdraft portion. Here's a trick I like to do to keep these hole saws from plugging up when making a cut like this is go ahead and start the cut just so you can get an outline and then I'm going to bore a hole with a small drill bit on the inside of the circle and now when you go back to use a hole saw this hole is going to provide an exit point for the wood that's being cut to go and now the hole saw won't get plugged up. Now that the base is done we can go ahead and move on to the hood portion and that's pretty simple just got to glue the side panels to the back panel and then put it on the top. Now it's time to start working on the side panels to start enclosing this so there's going to be a skinnier panel on the right and then there's going to be a wide panel on the left and what we have to do to these panels is notch out around the base of the saw so I'm going to start with the right one because it's a little bit easier but I'm going to flush it up with the side of the dust hood and then I need to start marking out on this piece where the base is and then I can cut it out and and test fit it and then keep doing that until it fits just perfectly like a glove I'm pretty happy with that fit so now we can go ahead and make the top pieces that help hold this onto the dust hood the last couple of parts that go on this dust hood are what I think make it the best dust hood that I've seen and the most efficient is the inside wings and the folding door panel that goes up over this opening and the way that those work are the wings are going to attach to the removable side panels flush with the edge one on the right side one on the left side and that's going to make a cavity here where the folding doors will slide back and forth on the last components to make are these folding doors that go over the saw and I'm just going to go ahead and assemble them together here before putting them on the dust hood and these two panels pivot together with a piano hinge in the center and then there's a another piano hinge that goes on the top which attaches it to the top of the dust hood just throw some tape on there for now see how it works sweet now there are a couple gaps on either side of the hinged panels but I'm going to show you how to make some gaskets to fill that area but I won't put those on until after the whole thing is finished so with all the building done I think that's the next step sand and paint I just finished painting all the components I've got two coats of red paint on the outside surfaces and all the inside surfaces are two coats of polyurethane now that I'm finished painting I can go ahead and put on the finishing touches and get it assembled one last time for the dust collection piping I'm going to be using this two inch black abs piping and I already went ahead and cut the right pieces to fit in here I've got this port which is going to go into the down draft portion and this piece is going to stick up inside and that's going to connect to a hose to the back of the miter saw to connect this hose to the back of my miter saw in the past I've just used PVC pipe couplings and shop vac couplings but this time I decided to 3d print my own adapter and because I wanted the saw to be relatively close to the back of the dust hood I need to have a right angle here and so I 3d printed this adapter which this end snaps on to the hose and then this end also snaps on to the back of the dust port of the saw to make sure the snap feature doesn't pop back off during use I'm going to wrap a zip tie around there and that'll make sure that those can't come unsnapped but it still allows it to rotate which is going to be handy for when I pivot the saw for miter cuts in goes the drawer and I just put a basic drawer pull on the front to finish off the hinged panels and then make some gaskets that go along the edges to seal the gaps between those panels and the removable side panels and that's pretty easy I'll just make those out of duct tape to keep these hinged panels up out of the way when I'm making miter cuts I cut this block of wood out and it's going to be a little holder to keep these up out of the way and I'm just going to screw it from the top and make sure that it can still pivot I have to make sure to install it on the inside of that inside wing that goes here and I made a mark where that is so as long as I install it on the right side of that it will be out of the way and good to go to attach the hinge panel to the top of the miter saw here I took out the bolt that holds this handle on on the back and I cut out a piece of plastic it's like a piece of plastic from an ice cream bucket and I looped that through a binder clip and that's going to give me a way to attach this to the saw and be able to disconnect it pretty easily I think it's time to test it out I'm pretty happy with how that's performing you can see how much dust we cut for the dustbin and that's mostly from the blade coming through the hose and it's obviously not 100% efficient there's some little pieces out front most of which bounce off the saws the woods being cut and kind of fling towards the front but there's a lot of dust being caught in the back of the dustbin and I'm sure with a much bigger dust collector we would catch a lot more of those pieces down the downdraft as well and in the drawer just from those few cuts that I made we're starting to get a pile on the drawer if you're interested in building one of these dust hoods for your miter saw I've got a very detailed set of plans available on my website the plans come with a built-in calculator so all you have to do is measure your saw and input those dimensions into the calculator and it will automatically adjust the drawings to fit the size of your saw that's it for this one see you in the next project which I think is pretty obvious miter saw station