Dixon's Forum

Dust — doomed for the SuperVac WindScoop.

I’ve heard horror stories about dust, construction dust.    Like sawing concrete in the basement will spread fine powder even onto garments in the upstairs closets.    People seem resigned to dusting the whole house a lot during remodeling.

Once I was on a commercial construction crew that does mostly concrete work, upgrading and adding on to a smalltown gradeschool.    The hallway was like twelve feet wide.    About halfway down there were side-by-side six-foot wide few step staircase and fourteen foot ramp.

When the new guy suggested the fourteen foot aluminum straightedge under the job trailer for getting the wet cement just right, the seniority scoffed, “We don’t need no straightedge!”, having worked concrete years and years, and so knew more than some new guy, who went around sweeping up scrap and sawdust, along with their tobacco spit, as they plied their experienced trowels, and got it wavy enough to rollercoast a wheelchair.    You couldn’t walk it without a stumble.

They decided to straighten it by grinding the humps and grouting the dips, guided by the fourteen foot aluminum straightedge from under the job trailer.

The new guy said they should enclose the area in a plastic tent over the area, with a couple of shopvac hoses stuck through, to keep the surrounding air flowing towards it; the dust could not escape.

The seniority had a better idea, informed by the certainty that no new guy could possibly be smarter than they, with their years and years more time working concrete.    They forewent the tent, and held the shopvac hoses close to the grinding to capture the dust.  They did indeed capture some, but the rest blew right past the shopvac hoses and covered every surface in every room, old and new.    It got in desks, in pantries, on books, only sealed chambers like refrigerators remained dust-free.

The school opted to have its own people handle the cleanup, and accomplished it in a nick of time for the new school year.

My unwillingness to mess up peoples’ places like that, plus my aversion of wearing dust masks, inspired me to invent the SuperVac Windscoop.

Click here    to take a look it, and here       for its home page. 

Next Week:   Maybe it’s time for another strip of “Diégo el Ciégo”.    Now that I’ve presented the stupidest one, the rest can only be better.