Casper wrote:

I have a house with a smallish basement. I say smallish because there
is enough space for my lathe, but not enough for the dust and debris
it creates.

Does anyone know of or have some ideas about how to confine the dust
and debris in say a 6' by 6' area?
mark

Mark..

I have no basement, so my lathe is in our "tiny" utility room.

Hope this helps. It works for me and was really cheap to make...

I took some PVC pipe and made a rectangle which I hung on the ceiling
then added material which hangs to the floor. It works like a shower
curtain. I spin the shroud closed (around the lathe and myself) to
turn and then open when I am done. I tie-wrapped a tiny shop vac to my
lathe. I tie-wrapped the widest vacuum bar upside down so it catches
debris as I turn. Then I remove the hose from the bar to vacuum up the
remaining mess around the lathe and floor. Viola! Clean as a whistle!

I picked out a plastic curtain material so I could have as much light
as possible filter into my turning area and also so I could see out in
case other people, or pets, were entering my work area as I turn.

Since my furnace is also in this room, I really had to keep the debris
and dust contained. I have a foam type furnace filter which I clean
monthly, and it does get dusty, but no where near as bad as without
the curtain. My neighbor has already blown his furnace motor twice
doing woodworking in his home without any containment. Those motors
may not be very expensive, but I'm not making replacement a habit.

Hope this at least gives you some ideas. Let us know what you finally
come up with as a solution. Good luck!

`Casper
"The greatest difficulty in life is to make knowledge effective, to
convert it into practical wisdom." ~Sir William Osler

Mark, you have two problems. The one you mentioned and the other one is
your lungs. Casper's post took care of the first. The second is a lot
harder to work on, not to mention more expensive. :-)

What you could do is seal the room with polypropylene and install a dust
collector that vents outside. What you do with the dust outside depends on
several thing - the chief of which is the "little woman." :-) You can
get a 650CFM dust collector from HF for not much, or a Jet for that matter
(think I bought mine for about $100) Either way you get the dust out of
the area and out of your lungs.

Deb