Using a shop vac for sawdust and woodchips makes a mess when you go to empty it or (God forbid) unclog the filter.
Big wood shops can use a proper dust collector even if it takes up a lot of space.
But what if you don't have a lot of space?
Oneida Air Systems makes a product called the Dust Deputy that you can bolt onto a five-gallon bucket and a shop vac. It will slow down the bigger dust particles by spinning them around in a funnel, like would happen inside a normal dust collector, and keep most of the dust out of the shop vac.
But what if you don't have a lot of space for a five gallon bucket and a big round shop vac?
Smaller shop vacs like the RIDGID 3 Gallon 5.0 Peak HP NXT are about the size of a toolbox. They'll work in an upright position if you find the valve that closes when they're picking up liquid and hold it open with a rubber band.
Instead of the 5-gallon bucket, you can bolt the Oneida Air Systems Dust Deputy onto a firmly sealing plastic box.
Here's my design for a plywood enclosure that holds these three things together so that they don't pull apart and tip over during use. It also helps a bit keeping the noise of the shop vac down.
The .scad file can be opened with OpenSCAD. Units are in inches.
It's 29 inches tall, 32 inches wide, and 13-1/2 inches deep. Joinery is left as an exercise for the reader (I went with dowels).
I also wound up installing the front panel on frameless, full overlap hinges and drilling a bunch of holes in the back for shop vac exhaust.
Amazingly, it does!
Given the tight angles of everything, I was expecting about half of the dust to make it to through the funnel and the other half to wind up in the shop vac. Imagine my surprise when emptying out the chips and seeing this inside the shop vac:
