Blown away

Last spring, I talked about a new tool I’d never seen before, a handheld blower, about the size of a small travel-size hairdryer. I was intrigued so I bought one. Light, pocketable and surprisingly powerful, the little guy puts out air up to 185 mph.   

Milwaukee came out with its own version this summer that blows that little one out of the water. (See what I did there?) The 3-speed tool has a top air speed up to 570 mph but weighs only 2 lbs. without battery. 

I decided to give it a thorough unscientific testing. First, I laid a tape measure on the floor and stretched it out to measure how far away the blower could do its job. Then I ran a piece of scrap against my spindle sander with the dust collection turned off, covering the entire sander table with fine dust as shown in Photo 1 below.  

Starting at 12' with the blower on the highest speed, I pointed it at the sander and gave it a blast. Didn’t think it would do much at 12' — in fact, I thought I might have started too far away — but to my surprise it blew off half the dust as in Photo 2. Whoa. 

Moving a foot closer, in Photo 3 you can see the result of another blast that nearly cleared the table. Then, at 10', it removed pretty much all the dust.  Impressed, for another unscientific test, I went out on the patio behind the shop and cleared it of leaves in a few minutes. 

Now, I’m certainly not going to use a blower to handle uncollected dust on my sander on a regular basis, but my dust test and leaf test showed that the blower is pretty capable. No, you can’t slip it into a pocket, but it does come with a belt hook for portability, as well as a selection of different sized nozzles and a cleanable air filter. 

I’m still using that little blower — it’s the perfect size to clean up my laser engravers after each use — but this is the one I’ll turn to when I need to tackle a big cleaning task. Like getting rid of leaves.