Getting ready for dust collection

I've had a permanent shop for about a year now. Prior to that I was storing the fire engine red router table in my closet, the benchtop table saw under the futon, the CMS in the entryway, and most of the smaller tools in the craftsman tote. I got my Ridgid table saw in November last year and since then have added a Rockler router table for my PC690, a drill press, and the table top jointer. However, in all this time I've only upgraded from one shop vac to two. About two weeks ago I was cutting some purpleheart and by the time I was done my sinuses were totally full. I wasn't 100% that day to begin with, and may have been coming down with a cold, but within 2 days I was at the doctors and was diagonosed with bronchitis. That's when I decided it was time to tackle dust collection. Why had I put it off for so long? Because I thought I could, and it seemed like a big task to undertake.

This weekend I started taking on that task. The first job was to figure out how to rearrange my equipment to make dust collection easier to plumb, and to find what unit to get. I just ordered a Grizzly 2HP Cyclone Collector, and I think I have figured out where to move everything to. I'll be going into more detail on the actual dust collector installation and plumbing and all that jazz in coming entries, today I just wanted to post on a few improvements to my table saw. I've decided I'm building a new bench, a modified version of the "Power Tools Bench" from Popular Woodworking. This is going to sit behind the table saw and work as an extended outfeed table as well as a bench. In order to avoid losing too much precious floor space I had to shorten the outfeed table on the saw. Ever since I installed the original outfeed table I had created a problem in that I couldn't tilt the blade more than 42 degrees before the motor hit the framing of the outfeed support. I figured I might as well fix this while I was at it. I also have wanted a small storage tray right near the table saw, and wanted to fill in the area to right of the table so that thin sheet goods can be lined up with the fence rather than sliding underneath it. The product of all these ideas was a small tray with a flip up cover, and a smaller outfeed table. It created 10" of extra table all the way around the table saw, giving me a 54"x40" table to work with. As usual, I went a little overboard with the details and crafted a stylish walnut handle for the front of the tray cover.