# Antiques, junk and The Best dust blower Ever!



## mtenterprises (Jan 10, 2011)

A bunch of years ago I picked up an old C type spring tension scroll saw, you know the ones from back in the 40s and 50s. Every now and then I'd pull it out and tinker with it but couldn't get it to work correctly. I kept breaking or bending blades. Well recently I saw Steve Ramsey on Woodworking for Mere Mortals using one and it inspired me to try again to get this antique to work. Well getting the spring tension correct on these things is a matter of trial and error but once you figure it out they work pretty good. Mine cuts a bit slower than my regular scroll saw which is nice. The reason I wanted to get this to work was it looked like it would be easier to do fretwork on it and it is compared to my regular scroll saw where you have to un-tension the blade, remove it with both blade clamps, remove the top clamp, tread the blade through the hole then replace the whole thing. So i was doing some Christmas ornaments and was finding the saw quite a pleasure to use except that there was no sawdust blower. I had to cut slow and stop to blow away the dust. As i cut i thought and thought and thought about how the blowers worked on other saws but the ideas wouldn't work on this type of saw. Then the idea light came on over my head, today it's an LED not an incandescent. Buried in the shop I had a couple nebulizer compressors. People throw these things out because "they are medical" can't be used for anything else. I have always wanted to see just how much pressure they would build up mainly for use with an air brush but never got around to it. I dug them out and just hooked up the hose and they blew a nice amount of air. Well, well, well a piece of stiff wire some electrical tape and some zip ties and low and behold I had a sawdust blower attached to the C frame of the saw. I taped the plastic tubing to the stiff wire so I could bend the wire to direct the air flow where I wanted it then I just zip tied the whole thing to the saw frame. These little compressors are much quieter than a regular full size compressor and a whole lot quieter than the shop vac and all the dust just disappears. Scroll-sawyers you have got to do this one it is the best. As an after thought I got to thinking I should wire it in to the power switch on the saw so when I started the saw the compressor came on too, something to do later.

MIKE


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## WoodNSawdust (Mar 7, 2015)

Sounds like a good idea. I inherited two from my mother that are kicking around somewhere.


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