 This is my homemade shop bag dust collection system that I made about two years ago. It's one of my most popular videos that I made on my woodworking channel. And it's probably my most used tool. Anytime the table saw comes on, the miter saw, sanders, I even use it to clean up the shop. So it's gotten a lot of miles in the last couple of years. This is going to be a follow-up video on how this thing has been holding up, things that have been working well, things that haven't been working well. And I'm going to answer some of the most frequently asked questions. First step, let's get this thing cleaned up. The most common questions I get is how much dust gets to the filter and in the top chamber. And as you can see, there is a nice coating of dust, very fine dust on inside the top chamber and all over the filter. As you can see, it's super fine dust. And it does coat the inside of the top chamber and it does get all over the filter as well. I think some people think that these cyclones are 100% efficient and really they're not. They just collect most of the dust in the bottom chamber where a lot of the fine dust still gets up inside. Ultimately, some of this fine dust on the filter is a good thing. It does help the filter better and not let as many particles through, but it does reduce suction a little as well. I cleaned this filter a few times ago, so it's still in pretty good shape, but this gives you an idea of how much dust actually gets up into the top chamber. Another common question I get is why didn't I make the lower dust chamber bigger? And the reason for that is I bought a 2 foot by 4 foot piece of polycarbonate for this project and I wanted the whole thing to fit on that sheet. So the upper section was dictated by how tall the filter is and that accounted for the majority of the polycarbonate sheet and whatever was left over is how big I could make the bottom dust chamber. Now I don't really have a problem with the size. I don't use this for a planer or a jointer that makes lots of big chips. I mainly only use it for finer dust and for cleaning up the shop. So I really don't have to empty that often. Maybe once a month and that's okay with me. One of the most frequent comments in the original video is how I forgot to put silicone on the bottom of this divider on the inside of the cyclone. And because I forgot to do that, all the dust has a tendency to collect in between the polycarbonate and this inside ring and it doesn't really look the best. Function is okay, but that's something I forgot and I can't really add it now either because this cyclone separator plate is blocking me from getting inside. So let them learn. Now that I've got it cleaned up, I can show you the biggest problem that I have with this cyclone. I used 100% silicone sealant to seal the polycarbonate to the painted wood rings but soon after I started using it, I was noticing that the sealant actually didn't stick very well to the polycarbonate at all. You can see when I stuck this pick behind here that I can completely run it behind the sealant and you can see there's really no bond between the polycarbonate and the adhesive. You can actually see straight through the bead of silicone and you can tell that the silicone's not actually bonded to the polycarbonate at all. Other than the obvious vacuum leak that that causes, there's also a pretty bad side effect. It howls as the air whistles through those little cracks and makes a terrible noise. When I first built the dust collector, was this just regular 100% silicone that I got from the hardware store and since I found out that doesn't stick very well to polycarbonate, I did some research on the internet and I stumbled upon this Seca-Cell and it was commonly regarded as a good adhesive for polycarbonate. I bought it from a website that actually sells polycarbonate panels and it was their recommended product. So I bought some to try to fix the dust collector leaks and what I want to do today before I try it on the actual dust collector is do a test piece. I've got some scrap piece of polycarbonate left over from when I built the dust collector. I also have a piece of painted 2x4 which is painted with the same paint, the same red paint I use on the dust collector. So I want to do what's called a peel test which is a common adhesive strength test where I'm going to apply a bead of each silicone to both substrates, one of the painted pine and one to the polycarbonate. I'm going to let that cure for several days and then I'm going to try to peel it off and see which one sticks the best. It's actually been three weeks since I applied this silicone so there should be no doubt that it's fully cured. So let's go ahead and try the peel test. I'm going to start with the silicone one and I'm just going to get it started with a razor blade so I can have something to grab onto just like that and then I'm just going to go ahead and peel and see what happens. So silicone broke there. That means it's sticking pretty good to the paint since the actual adhesive is failing and not the joint between the adhesive and the paint. So that would be a cohesive failure meaning the adhesive is doing its job sticking to the paint. Yep, I would call that a pass. Now let's try the Seca-Sill adhesive. Same thing, the adhesive just tore and it's still sticking pretty good to the paint. See if I can get a good grab on it. Yep, looks like the Seca-Sill also is a cohesive failure sticking really good to the paint. Yep, call that one a pass. Let's try it on the polycarbonate now. So start with the silicone, get that one started. Well, I can tell already. That is an adhesive failure and that is a total fail. Okay, moment of truth for the Seca-Sill on polycarbonate. Let's get that started. Looks like it's sticking pretty good to the polycarbonate. It's got a really good grip on it. Yep, I can't get it to come off of the polycarbonate. Looks like it's sticking very well. That's a pass. Well, I think the results of this test are pretty obvious. If you need to glue the polycarbonate, like in this case on my dust collector, avoid 100% silicone. Get yourself some of this. Since the silicone doesn't stick very well, that makes it pretty easy to take back off. The last thing I want to fix is this broken latch, which holds the upper section to the lower section. I previously made it out of a piece of plastic from my cutting board and I remade it this time out of aluminum so that will be much stronger and look a little better too. It's all been a few days since I applied the new sealant and it looks to be holding onto the polycarbonate pretty tight, so I'd say that that was a pretty good success. Now, I think that's ready to put this thing back into service and I could definitely use it. The shop needs a good vacuum. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.