Laser Engraver Activated Carbon / Charcoal Filter
Laser Engraver Activated Carbon / Charcoal Filter
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How to add an activated carbon filter to your laser engraver / cutter.
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If you've followed our how-to guide for building our DIY Laser Engraver Filtration Table for a laser engraver / laser cutter (or other fume producing machinery) then you may want to consider upgrading to an activated carbon (aka, activated charcoal) filter. Activated charcoal / carbon has the ability to really pull the smells out of the air you want to filter far more than fabric filters alone can.

Materials Used


Making The Filter


Upgrading our DIY filtration unit to one with activated carbon is actually very easy. First up, you'll need to make a box to hold the carbon pellets. I did this using my laser cutter and some scrap 1/4" thick MDF. In my case, I was limited by the size of the laser cutting area of my Epilog Mini 18 (12"x18") so I cut the box into 4 sections and then lasered out the MDF and glued it all together.

Since my filtration table was designed to use 20" x 25" filters that were 5" thick I made my MDF just slightly smaller than those dimensions (about 1/4" smaller all around). The bottom of the box has 4 large rectangular cutouts with a 1" cross shape in the middle for support and a 1" of width of MDF all along the inner edges.

I used the Washable HVAC filter, which can be cut to size, on the bottom of the MDF box. This gives a strong bottom to the box since those filters have a plastic mesh on them. I added a layer of aquarium filter media on top of the HVAC filter (zip tieing two 12" widths together to make one larger 24" width of filter media).


The key is making sure the pellets don't fall through the bottom of the filter which is why I used the washable HVAC filter structure along with the aquarium filter media on top of it. I saved the filter media that came with the HVAC filter for later.

It was then time for the activated carbon pellets. I rinsed these out in a bucket outside first. That's a very dirty job but will remove much of the dust covering the pellets. I've read that getting activated carbon wet can cause it to pull oxygen out of the air. If true, that's another good reason to do this job outside! Spread the wet pellets on an old towel or sheet to dry before proceeding.

I used a 3" layer of pellets in the MDF box, about half of the bag I bought. I then wrapped the edges of the aquarium filter up and over the top with the washable HVAC filter media covering the top of the pellets, mainly to make sure they didn't spill out but also to keep dust in while moving the box around. This unit slid right into my filter table and now I'm engraving with virtually no smells at all, though still exhausting the filtered air to the outside for safety.