I want to box in a noisy shop vac (from Ridgid) to minimize its noise
to _very_ low. I have come across many designs like that in books and
in this newsgroup, and I believe boxing in a shop vac should cut down
the noise significantly. I have a couple questions though:

- How quiet should I expect to get from boxing it in? Will it be
quiet enough that I can use it at 6:00 o'clock in the morning on my
boat (parked on my driveway) inside the boat cover? Please note that I
live in a 1/4 acre property and my neighbor's house is practically next
to my driveway. What's the dB level that I can cut down to anyway?

- Will the motor run hotter than it should if it is enclosed inside a
box with air vent on the side of the box? How much room I should leave
on top of the motor to allow enough cooling? I am asking this because
I need to run it with my sander to sand the boat deck flat, and this
may take longer than 10 minutes; therefore, I am afraid of overheating
the motor.

Yes, this is not a strictly woodworking question. But I figure people
into woodworking should be the expert in this area.

Thanks in advance for any info.

Jay Chan

I posted the above questions quite a long time ago. I got a lot of
good advices. I "finally" finish making the box to enclose the noisy
shop vac (from Rigid). The result is very good in term of sound
reduction - around 9 to 10db reduction. I have also replaced the old
sound reduction device (from Rigid that plugged into the air outlet)
with a version that uses spongy thing to reduce noise (also from
Rigid); this buys me an additonal 3db sound reduction.

The shop vac doesn't seem to run hotter than normal.

Having said this, I don't mean to recommend people to build a box to
reduce the noise from their shop vac. There are several problems of
using the box: (1) This takes time, money and effort to build the box
when we could have built other things (2) The box takes a lot of
valuable shop floor space (3) The cheap $13 spongy thing from Rigid
may be good enough for some people who don't need to cut down the
noise that much (4) At the end, it can only keep the noise in the
range of 67db (not as quiet as what I want) because the shop vac from
Rigid (an old model) is very noisy to begin with.

If I would start this over with, I might get an expensive but very
quiet shop vac instead of building the box.

Jay Chan