The workshops at Pinewood help make film sets for movies, manufacturing in wood and wood-based panels. Dustraction’s new installation services many traditional woodworking machines from makers like Wadkin, that have been on the floor at Pinewood doing the same work for years, together now with more up-to-date names like SCM that share the workload of today.

Noise is always an issue because filming is always going on somewhere on the million square feet of staging the film-makers are now working with. Dustraction has been tasked with reducing the sounds of dust extraction and disposal.

Due to the importance of noise abatement around the film sets, all the new filters and fans at Pinewood are now located indoors and have been partitioned off inside a dedicated new plant room. Systems contain several fans and duct mains, each serving a separate area of the shop floor, in a layout that enables individual areas to be shut down when not in use, making savings in power as well as noise.

Dustraction has been working on impeller noise generated by the traditional paddle-blade style of fan-set and there has been reports on big increases in efficiency as well as lower noise output.

Work done by the R&D team in the drawing office at Oadby has resulted in a new generation of ruggedly-constructed wood-waste handling fan-sets that retain the self-cleaning characteristics of the old paddle-blade styles, but which can also now operate at much higher pressures with increased efficiency as well as lower noise output due to improvements in blade design.

The new cyclofilters are Dustrax 5s which between them handle a total air volume of 11.3m³/sec. This represents a spare volume capacity of almost 50% for the future, which Pinewood’s man Jonathan Ash says may be needed sooner rather than later.

At Pinewood, Dustraction has now installed two new indoor cyclo-filter systems together with a number of fansets – one cyclofilter handles clean wood and the other plastics and non-recyclables – each plant discharging to externally mounted skips via closed loop cyclones.

The filter sleeves of Pinewood’s new reverse pulse cleaning systems generate good cake-waste release without significant cloth movement and meet continuous use requirements. Duct mains are run out of the new plant shop to external waste skips. The contract overall carried a completion clause for the end of May 2014, which Dustraction met.