Dust Collection Fence

This fence is designed to be used at a drill press or router table, and features built-in dust collection for keeping your shop, and lungs, clean.

- Logan Wittmer

If you ask me what my favorite tool in my shop is, I would have never guessed that I would have said it is my dust collector. But, after installing a powerful 5 HP Smart Gorilla from Oneida and spending time hard piping the entire system (you may recall reading about that in past issues back), I have to say: it’s a pleasure working in the shop with quality dust collection. Most tools have pretty decent dust collection built in. Some, however, need a bit of help in that department. This universal dust collection fence is designed to be used at the drill press and router tables to help gather some of that lose dust.

Plywood Parts

This little fence is built from plywood. Baltic birch is great if you have it, but any flat plywood would do. (As would MDF, if you’d like.) The entire fence requires very little material. You can get by with a quarter sheet from a big-box store. I built this fence 22" wide, but adjust it to fit whatever application you need. I found this size works well for a drill press or a small router table, and a larger router table would call for some simple modifications to make everything fit wider.

Most of the parts for this fence are straightforward. The fence base and face are rectangular in shape. Start by ripping all the stock to width. You can see this in Photo 1. When working with plywood, I never use the factory edge. While the edge of plywood may look okay, it is usually banged up and not straight. Running the edge over the jointer will clean up the edge and give you a true reference surface.