I got into woodworking at university when I padded out a semester with an art class. I actually brought my already perilously low CompSci GPA down even further with a D+ for my final grade. The professor didn't want an outsider in the class and they let me know in the hallway, discreetly. I reminded them I was paying full tuition and it was my entitlement - ha, how that would end up going.

12 years later I have my own little woodshop. But learning how to enjoy it has been a multi-year journey.

Everything from here on is just my opinion. I believe that in general, some people are more allergic to wood dust than other people. Some people seem to breathe in pine dust all year long and are fine. If I sniff a single crosscut of pine, I'll get stuffy and snotty for 3 days and I won't write code very well afterwards. So this has bit into my hobby, since I labor as someone who tries to write code.

I have a 2-stage cyclone dust collector. I won't shame any brands, but the popular model I have has a serous design defect and due to its short height, it doesn't reliably separate the dust from the air. I have played with it and found that adding a third stage, a passive cyclone from another vendor, catches almost all of the dust, maybe more than 99% of it. This effectively turned my 2-stage into a glorified blower, but I call it the "corrective lens of my personal Hubble".

Dust collection is about grabbing your dirty air before it pollutes your shop. Collecting chips (large pieces of wood) is nice, but the larger value is the dust - stuff that floats in the air for more than a few seconds (maybe upwards of a week). I was positive I could detect how dusty the air is with my super-bright LED lights, but this is false: after getting a few tools to measure the air, what I was sure was perfectly clean air, was still rife with dust. My LED test was invalid.

I have a 400 CFM air filter. A box hanging from chains that cleans the air. A little actual math revealed that I needed more like five of these units; I got them, and with the proper sizing, they actually work very well. These suck up all the dust that escapes the dust collector. I have read that they work better with time, forming cobwebs that increase the 'grabbiness' of the filter.

Inversely, the dust collector, which has a large cylinder shaped filter about the size of a person, needs to be pristinely clean to operate correctly. Once I cleaned mine for the first time, I more than doubled the suction at each connection. I ran my own HVAC network using cheap box store fittings, and so far it works fine. If I had more than a couple horsepower, it would collapse these cheap parts if I ever forget to leave a single connection open. I can say for sure that the 40 feet of pipe I have run has far too many leaks to collapse during a port mishap.

I learned about the Dylos air quality meters from the channel Mattias Wandel runs, along with many other ideas. With a device for measuring the air quality, a dust collector, air cleaners, and the ultimate luxury, a 3M PAPR (self contained air filtering with a helmet and a little belt pack), I have finally found one strategy for enjoying this hobby of mine. I will admit that figuring this out has been a huge part of the fun: hacking at how to keep my lungs and brain happier while turning wood into sawdust. I can't qualify beyond what I feel, that I feel fine, but that's good enough for me.