If you ever had a mitre saw, you have probably run into the issue of how much saw dust it creates and how to clean it up.  My mtire saw came with a dust collection bag, but it doesn’t really work and the dust gets everywhere.  Previously I just vacuumed up the saw dust with a shop vac, but it seemed like a lot of effort.  I tried connecting the shop vac hose to the mitre saw dust collection port and turning it on when sawing with the mitre saw.  This reduced the saw dust by a little bit but the saw dust still shot out of the sides and front, so it didn’t help that much.

I asked on message boards what others had done and it seemed that the most common solution was to use a mitre saw hood.  This is a covering to block the saw dust from going beyond the mitre saw hood, and kind of looks like a tent.  Companies do make these mitre saw hoods for sale and they can be found on Amazon.  However, on Amazon these hoods are $150 or more which seems like a lot for such a simple product.  An example of a mitre saw hood can be found here, note the price of $160.

Besides the price these hoods seem really bulky.  My current mitre saw backs up to the wall and there is only a few inches of space behind it.

I then saw some messages about people who made their own mitre saw hood out of a baby tents (a very small tent used to protect babies from the sun).  I looked into this, but the cheapest baby tents on Amazon were still $40 or more.

So I started to think of my own solutions.  All I really needed was something lightweight and fairly flexible to cover the mitre saw and contain the saw dust when in use.  What immediately came to mine was an Ikea bag, as I already use an Ikea bag to cover the Mitre saw when it is not in use so me kids don’t try to touch it.  Ikea bags are cheap, you can get a 10 pack of Ikea bags at Amazon for $20, see the following link: Amazon Ikea Bags

People pointed out the bag handles could get caught in the saw so I cut all of those off. I have one bag on each side of the mitre saw, with the bag held up by a cut pool noodle. The pool noodle has a screw inserted which also connects to the bag so that they stay in place. So far having these bags on the sides to collect saw dust has worked really well. Also the best part is the materials only cost $5 ($2 per bag and $1 for the pool noodle). This is how the final product looks:

The following video describes this in more detail.