Any dust hood you build for your cross-cutting station has to be customized to fit your saw. I built mine around a 10" non-sliding DeWalt mitre saw. There are times when I’d prefer to use a bigger saw in my shop, but this doesn’t happen very often and it’s much easier to design a dust hood around the smaller, non-sliding tool.
Cut the dust-hood sides from 1⁄2"-thick plywood, then connect them with the top, angled and back pieces cut from 1⁄4"-thick plywood. I used glue and 5⁄8"-long brads to secure the parts. The completed hood doesn’t need to be fastened to the top of your dust table. Mine works fine just sitting there. I’ve never found the need to finish workshop projects such as this. They work just fine without being sealed.
Customize your dust hood
If the mitre saw isn’t the dirtiest power tool in the shop, then it has to be close to the top of the list. Plumes of fine sawdust spray off the blade with every cut, and I’ve never seen a factory-designed dust port that solved this problem, even when hooked up to a powerful vacuum. That’s why I designed a dust hood for my mitre-saw station—and it works quite well.
Start by placing your saw in its position on your cross-cutting station. Swivel it from side to side and chop it up and down to get a sense of its range of motion. The smallest hood dimensions will collect dust best, as long as there’s room to move the saw to various angle positions and capture dust as it sprays off while making mitre cuts. Non-sliding saws are easier to surround with a hood than sliders, and that’s one reason why I built my hood around this kind of saw.
If you’re having a hard time visualizing the shape of hood that’ll work best around your saw, build a mock-up using corrugated cardboard and hot-melt glue before committing the shape to plywood. Begin by building the overall hood with none of the cut-outs required for handles and other parts as the saw swivels and chops. You’ll find it easiest to customize the cut-outs by simply seeing where the saw touches the hood and where it needs to be trimmed back. And, remember, there’s no need to trim the hood to accommodate every possible angle you might adjust your saw to. One of the advantages of leaving the dust hood loose on top of your dust cabinet is that it can be lifted off or moved to one side easily for those occasional cuts that require the saw to be tilted to one extreme or another. If you’re anything like me, most of your cross cuts are at 90°.
Use glue and 5⁄8"-long brads to fasten the plywood hood’s parts to its sides. The joints are narrow where the hood top, angled piece and hood back meet. Apply glue to these connections, using masking tape and no nails to hold them together until the joints dry.
I like making things from scratch, but using metal tool cabinets in my workshop offers advantages I can’t pass up. They’re strong, rollable and the best models have drawers that slide effortlessly on ball-bearing glides. It would be hard to make a cabinet with the same features and capacity for much less money. That said, you still need to modify metal cabinets and add features to get the most from them in a wood shop. Each of the black cabinets in the mitre-saw station sit on a Delta universal rolling machine base. They’re designed to support stationary woodworking machines, but I assembled them with hardwood rails cut to suit these cabinets. I also used a step drill to bore holes in the bottom drawer front, so battery-charger power cords could exit without being pinched. I like to keep chargers on the go and out of the way, and putting them in a metal drawer eliminates any fire hazard if a charger malfunctions.
Rare-earth magnets hold the metal electrical outlet box anywhere that’s convenient on the side of the cabinet. A cable from this box plugs into a single wall outlet to energize the array of outlets on the box.
Read more in Workshop Essentials and Shop Set-Up
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