How to install grounding wire?

General
1

Daniel has sent out a few emails about grounding. I ordered a grounding kit to slide inside my dust collector hose consisting of a bare 14 Ga stranded wire and crimp-on connection lugs GROUNDING KIT FOR DUST COLLECTION – Busy Bee Tools . Which end of the dust hoses do I connect to ground; the shop vac end or the CNC motor end or both? Or do I connect the wire to the neutral wire at the 110V outlet that I plug the shop vac into?

Please note that Busy Bee Tools is a Canadian company. Anyone one in the USA will have to search the internet to find an American source.

2

I asked Daniel that when I visited PwnCNC this week. Until he has a chance to join the thread, here’s what I think I understood:

  1. Every multi-wire cable coming from the power source has a mesh of wire enclosing the conducting lines. That mesh prevents the magnetic field emanating from nearby wires from affecting the messages moving within the sheath. That mesh lies just beneath the plastic coating on the cable.
  2. Carefully shave a little of the plastic coating to expose the mesh without harming the wires beneath it.
  3. Wrap a conductor (small-gauge wire is fine) around the mesh, making a metal-to-metal connection. (No solder or mechanical clamp required, just some electrical tape ). This is now a grounding wire.
  4. Run the assembled bunch of these to a metal stake (typically copper) driven into the ground outdoors. The cables are now (literally) “grounded”.
  5. Daniel called this a “maintenance” task. It’s a “best practice” that he intends to complete on his own machine, but hasn’t gotten around to, yet.

All the above is a bit diagonal to your question, since you’re discussing a wire in a vacuum line. The power Daniel wants to dispose of comes from the magnetic field that wires generate. The power you want to discard comes from static energy of moving dust-laden air. It doesn’t matter which end you send to the ground, but it does matter whether your ground receives the energy you’re trying to discard. Electricity enters metal tubing at all points along its travel. A wire outside plastic vacuum tubing has to connect to some metal item that is exposed to the static energy, and then can go to a ground. If it takes energy away at one end of a tubing run, but more static energy builds further away, you need to connect that second build-up to your grounding wire.

Even the “ground” from your household electricity is literally connected to the ground. But if any connection isn’t intact, then you have no ground. If any mistake causes a power SOURCE in your ground wire, there’s another problem. (I have had measurable voltage in some white wires in my home). Connecting our (home-made) ways of dissipating unwanted electricity to a copper rod in the ground is the safest, most reliable method.