How to keep a computer clean inna workshop

[Barry Young]

You should have no problems with wood dust in your computer. I was the programmer and CNC dept. supervisor for three years in a very large and busy furniture company. We did nothing to protect the computer which was located adjacent to a large Routomat 250 CNC router which threw wood dust all day long. Never had any problems with the computer at all. I cleaned out the guts of the computer about once a year with an air hose and it was incredible how much dust accumulated inside the case with absolutely no problems.

In my shop at home I have just built a bench for the new CNC Bridges mill table which will be coming soon. In that bench I incorporated a dust control system because there will be a lot of brass cut on this machine. Brass would definitely be worse in the computer than wood dust. Walmart has a miniature box fan about 12 inches square. I built a mount inside the bench for one of these fans. The mount seals the sloping sides of the box fan. On the outside of the bench I applied pressure sensitive (sticky) velcro hook strips. Home Depot sold me some Air conditioning vent filters which when pressed onto the hooked velcro attach just like a loop strip. Very effective and very cheap.

The fan will give positive pressure to the bench to keep out the mean brass chips. That is the plan anyway.

Barry Young
Young Camera Company

[Matt29c]

My computer is stuck in a hot wooden box, so i just pulled all the fans out and liquid cooled everything with home made Water blocks and a small pond pump from HD and a radiator from Tigerdirect.com and the water tank is some Plastic bait tank i got from my local fishing goods dealer. works really well runs around 28C and i use it in my outside work shop which is in 98-100F weather with very high humidity (FloridaKeys) and its keeps on truckin, but the computer its self isn't very expensive i got most of the compnents for free and its most expensive part is the 500GB Sata HDD.

[ImanCarrot]

Brass would definitely be worse in the computer than wood dust

I Diamond Turn aluminium occasionaly and the swarf (or chips) comes off in long streamers. they're very fine- they float about, significantly they float into all me bleeding electronics and as you know ally is quite a good conductor of electricity.

I went the same way as Matt29c- totaly enclosed the PC and liquid cooled it. Never looked back, a bit of bleach in the system keeps the bacteria (gunge) down, but I change the water once a month just in case.

[dbtoutfit]

Originally Posted by gregmary I have a dust collector on my CNC, but with the sanding, cutting, general woodworking, dust is an inevitable demon in my workshop. How do I keep it out of the CNC computer? I am interested in how others have solved this problem. Filters on the computer case? An isolated environment for the computer? Don't worry about it??? I use one of those flexible keyboards that are sealed, but my computer sucks in the air and the little bit of dust there in the air builds up. Greg

The cheapest and most easy way to keep dust out is to simply cover the outside off all your intake fans with panty hose. It's cheap works well and one hose goes a long way.

For real easy install and removal of panty hose filter simply take a fast food drink cup that the opening end fits around your fan. Take the cup and cut the cup about 3 inches (give or take) from the opening so that now you have a "tube or pipe" if you will. Take a hot glue gun and hot glue this cup in position so that the air is being pulled in to the case thru the cup. Now simply cut some panty hose close to the shape of the end of the cup yet make it bigger so it will fold over. Grab a rubber band, stick the panty hose over the "tube/cup" then the rubber band over the hose.

This will allow for very quick and easy maintenance of the filters.

Eric
XmarkComputers.com

[Cruiser]

I took a standard fuzzy heater A/C filter and cut a piece to fit inside the cover on inlet side of pc. This helps tremendously but you will still on occasion need to take the air and blow out the pc ! The fine dust particulates still get inside and static bond to anything with some kind of charge. If it don't blow out i take a spritzer bottle with alcohol and moisten the whole thing then blow it all out again while moist. let it gas off some before powering up again, so far i have had no problems doing this. be mindful tho blowing in the proximity of the hard drives ! you don't want to blow anything into the drive. I'm no expert but this works for me. I've cleened up several of my pc's this way.

[dpuch]

Basically you have seal it off entirely. Then use water cooling, or a closed heat exchanger like on some CNC cabinets.

Positive air pressure with a single air supply that is well filtered. No other fans blowing in.

Throw a filter on the whole thing.


Personally the positive air pressure is my pick.

Dale

[Big_d]

Without stressing the obvious have you considered putting the cover on??? Perhaps you could try throwing the wood shavings into the bin rather than on your pc.
But seriously a low cost fix for that would be a cardboard box that the pc fits into with plenty of room to spare, seal up all the joints with tape and leave one side open. Cover that side with some panty hose. If the fan is far enough way from the filter it should let all the dust fall off when you turn it off. Self cleaning and EL cheapo.