Wood, Tools and Thoughts: Installing the Incra Cleansweep Dust Collector

First off, I apologize for all the grainy and dark photos. I was working pretty late in the shop and didn't have much light to work with.

Having done quite a lot of routing lately, it gets pretty dusty without proper dust collecting equipment. Luckily, Incra makes this box that fix under your router table enclosing the router plate and what ever dust and wood chips get spun out from underneath the table. I really thought that installing this was going to be slam dunk 15 minute thing. But of course.. NOT.

So this thing was not designed with installation in mind for people who have built a 3 sided enclosure with their router table. I'm going to talk about the steps I went thought to get this thing properly installed so you don't have to hack it.

Incra Cleansweep DustCollector

Below is a picture of the assembled enclosure. It's the first step in the instructions. The next step is mounting it under the table. Don't try to mount this upside down. It's not going to work. There are just too many screws and bad angles if you don't have clear line of sight or obstructions in the way. I tried and waste a good 15 minutes on it. Ended up dismounting the router lift and table fence, then detaching the table from the table frame and flipping the table over. Doing all that really only took 10 minutes. Go figure... When mounting the enclosure on to your table, make sure to drill pilot screws first. The wood screws that come with are not self drilling.

Enclosure assembled and screw mounted to the under side of the table.

Modification to Table

Several modification was necessary to accommodate the enclosure. I had a shelf in the mid-section of the void in the frame of my table. I had to lower the shelf about 4 inches. You need to lower it enough so that the slider for the 4 inch dust collection port door has room to move in and out. The shelf support on the table side walls had to move down 4 inches and I had to slide the shelf support board to allow for the dust port hole to nest through.

In the picture below, you will also see the two holes in the back panel of the table. These holes allows me future access to fiddle with the enclosure's back panel screws if I ever needed to partially unscrew them to jar the door open to feed the router wire through or replace the router all together. I think this is essential that the holes are added if you a back panel to your table like mine.

Modifications to inside of the table. Note back panel and support shelf.

The shelf was also shortened to a length not to hit the dust port of the enclosure.

Shortened shelf.

Wiring

With the table top upside down and enclosure mounted to the table still, I threaded the router cord through the back of the case with the grommet attached. Note that you need to be inventive with how you do this because eventually, you'll need to flip the table back over top side up without stepping over or dragging your router motor unnecessarily over the floor. Luckily, my Bosch router comes with long cord and this step proved to be easy.

Also note that is is not necessary to attach the grommet into the hole in the back panel, but you should try as an exercise of how it works and familiarizing on how to install blindly. The instruction tells you a clamp is necessary to squeeze the grommet into the hole, but I found it totally unnecessary unless you have fatter than normal cables.

Router power cord routed through back of enclosure door.

Router sitting on the ground with router cord routed between the table frame and table and into the router lift hole and out of the enclosure.

The router still on the ground with the attached cable going into the router lift hole as an end result of table being flipped over to the upright position.

Installed

Now with everything installed, this is how it should look.

Installation with no router in it.

Installation with router in it.

More Things To Note

For the front panel, there are these cylindrical nuts which are installed to the upper most corners of the panel. Do not tighten them down all the way in the beginning. If you do, they will need to be loosened and tightened after the front door is installed into the enclosure. These nuts act as sliding clamps for the up/down motion of the door. And you tighten them down to fit the thickness of the enclosure edge that acts as a railing for these nuts.

Small cylindrical nut for front door.

If you have a shelf, make sure you also cut a section out to accommodate for the up/down sliding action of the front door. If not, you'll need to bend the bottom of the door out to open which may or may not bother you. I ended up accepting the fact that I will need to bend the door since I did not want to take everything out to make the cut for this little inconvenience.