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I have been using rotary wire brushes to do the first de-rusting ritual on old metal parts. But the wire brush bristles come loose and fling everywhere over the shop. They end up in my shoes and get tracked into the house.

It is my understanding that this will happen no matter what type of rotary brush I use. Given that, what is a good practice to avoid tracking all of those filaments back into the house?

I believe the answer may be to buy/build a special enclosure connected to my dust collection system and do all of my wire bristling brush within that enclosure. But that consumes shop space for a ritual that is not used all that often to justify that shop space consumption. But, I will resort to doing that if that's really the best solution. Because it beats getting those high carbon bristles stuck into getting into carpets, bare feet, etc.

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    I'm not sure this is a question for us. We can't see your home and we don't know your traffic habits, etc. If you're just looking for ideas, that's too broad for this Q&A site. I would maybe use a tracked curtain which can be tucked away when not in use.
    – isherwood
    Mar 13 at 19:19
  • @isherwood Yes I specifically kept that detail from the question because I didn't want to specify details of my shop setup other than "space restricted". This is actually ok because the others that read this post may have different configurations (larger space than I have, detached garage doing double duty as a shop/maker-space, attached garage with no builtin utility sink, etc.)
    – bgoodr
    Mar 16 at 14:23

1 Answer 1

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  • Clean up with a strong magnet.
  • Wear a shop apron, that stays in the shop.
  • Quite possibly also dedicate an old pair of shoes to be shop shoes, that stay in the shop, for this infrequent task, or other messy ones.
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    Top tip: put the (massive rare earth) magnet in a Tupperware container and pick up shavings on the outside of it.
    – Aloysius Defenestrate
    Mar 13 at 21:03
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    Do the wire brushing in a box. Or get one of those jobsite magnetic sweepers and sweep before you go back into the house.
    – Huesmann
    Mar 14 at 13:27
  • "Clean up with a strong magnet.": That is good if I knew where the bristles were, but the bristles fling everywhere. Today I did a deeper clean and found those bristles found their way into every nook and cranny around my machine vise that held the object being worked on.
    – bgoodr
    Mar 16 at 14:25
  • "Wear a shop apron, that stays in the shop.": Good advice. The detail I intentionally did not state in the question is that this is a attached garage with no way to avoid going back into the house repeatedly (bathroom breaks, washing of hands). I can and will install a utility basin, but not a specific-to-the-garage bathroom which is in the house. I have an apron, and I will have to change that apron to use velcro to be able to take it on and off quickly as I go into and then back out of the house.
    – bgoodr
    Mar 16 at 14:27
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    ... Given the nasty nature of these high-carbon-steel bristles in the working mans toes, I might just need to figure out some drop curtain setup that I can setup and tear down for when I'm doing wire brusthing activities.
    – bgoodr
    Mar 16 at 14:35

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