[Mark Jones Ozark]

If you drill a 1/4 inch hole in the corners of the gate valve slide when you close the gate slide it will push the saw dust out. Don't drill into the plate that slides back and forth. Only in the outside sleeve. What I mean is drill the hole with the gate in the open position. Then when you close it it shuts off the gate and pushes the saw dust out to the holes you drilled on both sides of the slide. Takes about 5 minutes to fix all your gates in your shop.

 

[Mark Jones Ozark]

Drill the holes with the gate open and it can be installed as well. After the holes are drilled when you close the gate it pushes the sawdust out the hole and the plate has not been drilled so it shuts off the air flow just like it did before.

 

[Mark Jones Ozark]

I drafted this up in Vcarve in about 3 minutes. Its not to scale but it gets the point across.

 

[Mark Jones Ozark]

It works. Fixed about 10 leaky gates in about 10 minutes. Just don't drill the holes with the gate closed! The gate when it closes pushes the sticky sawdust out through these holes. You can watch it do it. This was not my idea. I found it on the web many years ago. Lot's of people don't know about it. I don't understand why they don't fix the design and make them that way from the factory. DISCOVERY!

 

[Mark Jones Ozark]

Nice gates. How did you handle the dust that settled in these? Did the slot go all the way through and they were self cleaning that way?

40 years ago I made (15) some using a Fine Woodworking article they were made out of maple, 1/8" steel plate with felt seals 3" pvc and aluminum with brass contacts so when you opened them up they turned on the Dust Collector. (This was before they had or I had discovered for small shop dust collection machines and gates.)

Lots of great ideas from sharing what we are doing. This last week I built a shop vac sound deadening box. While my current project of CNCing 11 parts out of 4' of 1x10 for making 16 wooden canteens for our Royal Rangers (church boyscouting program) to assemble and glue up I put that quiet shop vac to work vacuuming cob webs and spider webs in the shop. It was nice having a cleaner quieter shop. Will hand the boys two 2 ' pieces of wood with the parts all cut but held in place by tabs so they can clean them up and assemble in a couple of wed nights. All they will need is a utility knife, sand paper, dap rapid set glue and some clamps. This rapid set glue is new to me. I was skeptical about it at first but it has proven to be a great glue for many uses. I can assemble in 4 minutes and it's ready to surface plane or machine in 30 minutes. New ideas are sometimes pretty good. (However most new ideas will be wrought with 99 fails before they pan out...) GRIN! In this case I like this new idea!