I bought this unit from Amazon, and had read in the reviews a number of owners had trouble with things being bent during shipping. Well, add another one to the list. When I first plugged it it, the squirrel cage made about a half a revolution, then stopped. I removed the filters and tried spinning it by hand, It turned, but is was scraping as it went around. Since I’d read of a number of people fixing similar problems themselves, I decided to tear it apart and try doing the same. I really didn’t want to deal with shipping such a large package back to Amazon.

First step was to remove the squirrel cage and the motor. In their brilliant design, Jet made things so all the electrical connections from the motor attach to the electronic control panel with multi-pin plugs. Except one. The ground wire was connected with a hard-to-reach spade connection held in place with a nut. To heck with that. Snip.

After getting the squirrel cage/motor assembly out of the case, it saw what the problem was. One of the four motor mounts was bent, to the cage was tilted about 1 inch out of plumb with the other three, causing the cage to tilt, and thus rub the side of the blower housing. Without too much trouble, I removed the motor and mount from the cage, and with a few whacks of the dead blow hammer, the mount was bent back to where it was supposed to be. Another 5 minutes or so later, I had it all put back together, plugged it in, and it ran like a top. Nice and smooth. BTW, I added a length of wire and a couple wire nuts to handle the snipped ground wire.

That little glitch out of the way, it was time to hang it. By the way, this thing is bigger than I’d expected. Not terribly heavy, but big. It dwarfs my garage door opener. I ended up drilling through the roof trusses and running long eye bolts through the drywall ceiling and the trusses, with a nut and washer holding them in place. Fortunately, the previous owner left several access holes in the ceiling of the garage, so I was able to position it between two of these holes, allowing me to reach the bolts and nuts holding things in place. After getting the bolts in place, it took a bit of wrestling to get the filter up into position, but I did it in incremental steps, and eventually got it where I wanted it.

Although far from a scientific test, the preliminary results from my Dylos Air Quality Monitor look very promising. When I got done hanging the filtration unit, I turned on the Dylos meter and got a reading of about 20,000/1,500, where the 20,000 represents the number of 0.5 micron particles counted in 10 seconds of sampling, and the 1,500 is the number of 5 micron particles detected in the same period of time. These are very high numbers, according to Dylos. (The 20,000 was uncharacteristically high, since I was smoking a cigarette at the time, and that will easily double the 0.5 micron count.) After running the filter for about an hour on medium speed, I checked the numbers…they were at about 900/2. That’s a very significant drop. I don’t recall ever seeing the 0.5 micron number below about 8,000 or 9,000 before. When I get a chance, I intend to do some more testing under real woodworking conditions (and without the smoke skewing the results). I think it’s going to definitely help reduce the amount of dust on all the flat surfaces in the shop.

I’m still not happy about having to completely dismantle a new piece of equipment and beat it with a hammer to make it work.

Wow.. Where to begin… It actually arrived a day earlier than UPS predicted, unfortunately that meant my wife had to deal with the huge, heavy box, not me. It seemed to be fairly well packed, but that’s where the good things stopped. After wrestling it out of the packing material I sat it on the workbench and removed the packing braces from the inside, plugged it in and fired it up. Or at least I tried. It made a soft groaning noise and did nothing. So.. Unplug it, remove the filters and attempt to spin the fan by hand. It spins, but scrapes every revolution. Looks like the squirrel cage is out of alignment. Grab the allen wrenches, remove the 6 bolts that hold the fan assembly to the shell and try to back the shell out of the housing. The wires from the control panel (which is a completely exposed circuit board inside, no dust protection at all) are only a foot long. All but one are on a removable plug. The one that isn’t is bolted to the control panel meaning that the whole panel has to be removed to get it loose. Once I finally get the fan housing out and get a close look at things I realize that two arms of the motor mount (an X shaped thing) are badly bent. Since there was no damage to the housing, it had to have been assembled this way. 10 minutes of bending, tapping and banging and it was pretty much straight. However the squirrel cage still seems to wobble. It no longer hits anything though. So, I plug it back in and fire it up. It’s running, but since I’m not certain how much noise it’s supposed to make, I’m not sure it it’s really fixed.

The remote only works from the back side of the unit, which means that I’ll have to walk over to the garage side of my shop to turn it on, not exactly convenient.

In the usual method of “cost savings” these days they don’t give you the bolts or chains to actually hang it, you’ve got to provide them yourself.

I bought this based on price and magazine reviews, but I think I would have been better off with the Penn State Industries model.

This JET air filtration system is great. It is relatively quiet when turned on. There is a small quirk with the use of the remote, but there is a workaround. The quirk is that the remote control will only turn the unit on under flurescent lighting! The quirk apparently occurs only when flurescent lighting is on in the shop!! What woodworking shop does not have flurescent lighting?? The workaround is: Take your remote to the light switch that controls flurescent lighting in the shop. Turn the lights off, then use the remote to control the JET unit, then turn the lights back on!

I purchased the AFS-1000B, tested out the unit, seemed fine. Went into my shop the next day and it was running even though I had turned it off. Turns out, if you set the timer and then change your mind and turn it off, it will turn itself on a couple of hours later and run until you stop it. Could be days! Jet sent me a new board, I installed it, same thing. So I returned it for another AFS-1000B. Same thing happens. This one is going back in the box and being returned and I’m now shopping for a unit that works properly and isn’t possessed.

Contact Jet before you buy to see if this has been corrected. Could be a good tool.

Jet’s reply from tech support on 2/28/08:

Thank you for writing. There is a solution in the works, but I don’t know what it’s going to be. I’ll let you know as soon as I have an answer.

Aundrea Berkey

Internet Customer Support

WMH Tool Group

Makers of POWERMATIC®, JET®, and WILTON® products

I just bought this air filtration system yesterday from a local store (could not wait for it to be shipped as I was in the middle of a project). My basement is relatively clean (or so I thought), but I quickly realized that it was not dust-free when I started a painting project. After a few frustrating coats of paint, where I had to wet sand all the dust specks out, I research this system on Amazon and decided to buy it. Best decision I ever made. After running it in my basement for about 5 hours, I restarted my painting project. I left the unit on low during the actual painting. When I checked on the paint job this morning, not one speck of dust was present in the paint! I don’t know much about the technical specs of this unit (how big is 1 micron, anyway?), but I’m here to tell you that this system works! If you can afford the time to wait for shipping (which I am sure Amazon is pretty quick), then buy this unit from Amazon. The price here is as good as it gets, and the system overall is a great value.