Miter saws are incredibly useful and one of the first power tools I bought that wasn’t a hand tool. As useful as they are, they produce a lot of bad dust. The high speed cutter makes a fine dust that gets kicked back and up out of the tool. The little catch bag that comes with them helps, but much of the dust still escapes and becomes airborne.

I tried attaching a vacuum to the dust port in the back, but that only catches about half the dust. The rest just blows right by. Instead a big funnel would guide all the high speed dust into a vacuum port. That was the thought at least. It works a little better than just using the saw’s dust port, but not much better.

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I had some plywood rings left over from my dust collector upgrade and thought this one would make a nice base to start with. I attached a 2×4 with holes in it for dowels to elevate the dust catch.

The big gulp dust catcher attaches to a similar piece of 2×4 with some plywood in between to help spread out the load. The upper 2×4 had the holes reamed out so it would slide easily. A set of screws goes through the 2×4 into the dowels to keep everything at the right height. I didn’t know exactly what height would be ideal, so I made it adjustable.

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To adapt from the big 4″ port to my mobile shop vac I printed some adapters with a 3″ PVC elbow. Once again, 3D printer to the rescue when it comes to adapting dust collection fittings.

I am still getting a lot of dust blown all over the place, even with this large catch. Using a large dust collector instead of my shop vac might help, but I feel like dust is deflected in too many directions by the time it gets to this big gulp. I have used this for a few weeks and haven’t come up with a good solution yet. It may require a better catch on the pivoting saw bracket. I will include any updates made.