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What are the sound frequencies (Hz) of common woodworking machines?

Woodworking Asked on December 19, 2021

I am trying to improve the sound insulation in my garage shop, and I gather that Sound Transmission Class (STC) ratings of different soundproofing solutions vary as function of Hz levels of sounds. I have read that the loudest machines like planers and table saws have relatively lower Hz levels, but I can’t find any tables offering range of HZ levels to expect for planers vs table saws.

2 Answers

I have an audio spectrogram app on my tablet, so I took it into my workshop and made a couple of measurements, using the power tools I had setup for a project (table saw, orbital power sander, and trim router; don't have a power planer, sorry). I used all softwood material (18mm pine), kept the tablet about 1m from the tool, and decoupled it from the workbench with a bit of foam.

My workshop is only about 4.5m by 7m, and has concrete floor/ceiling, sandstone walls and glass door/windows all around, so there's plenty of reflections; really not an ideal environment for any type of sound measurements: levels will be off in general (on the louder side), and some frequencies will be attenuated while others are amplified. So I don't know how useful the results will be for your sound isolation problem; different tools (make and model) will certainly sound different, too. But it's at least one data point.

Spectrogram Tablesaw Spectrogram Powersander Spectrogram Router

Here's how you read those graphs (click on them to open full size). The upper third shows the audio spectrum (log-frequency on the x-axis, logarithmic sound pressure spectral density in dB/Hz on the y axis); yellow is current (updates every 25ms), red is max hold for the entire measurement. The lower part shows a waterfall diagram of the spectrum over time: log-frequency is on the x-axis, time is on the y-axis (going up, so further down the graph is older), sound pressure spectral density is color coded using the log color scale shown on the left; higher sound pressure is shown in a brighter color. I've set it up so that the ull time range of the waterfall is about 10s. Since sound level is in dB, because of the logarithm a change by only 6dB is equivalent to double or half the noise.

In the first image, I first turned on the table saw, then added the dust extractor (big shop vac) a couple of seconds later, then did three quick crosscuts in 18mm pine, and finally shut the table saw and the vac off at the same time. There's plenty of sound energy all across the spectrum even with the saw just idling. The cuts add very distinct high frequency noise, you can even see the frequency going down a bit during the cut as it puts load on the motor. The dust collector doesn't register all that much on the graphs, even though subjectively it makes a lot of noise.

Same story in the second image: I first turned on the orbital sander, then the dust extractor, then lightly sanded a piece of pine using 80 grit sand paper. The waterfall shows a strong fundamental at 200Hz (my power is 50Hz), with plenty of harmonics up to about 5kHz. The Sanding action reduces the high frequency concent quite a bit, but adds lots of low frequency energy. Sometimes, you can see the frequency going down briefly as I pressed down a bit harder (I know, really should not do that) until the constant rpm feature in the sander revs it up again.

Finally, the trim router shows about the same characteristics. Looking at the max hold, this is actually the noisiest of the three tools. And I believe you can see me breathing after the router rev'd down.

All in all, the bad news is that all three power tools have energy content over the entire audio spectrum; if you were hoping to get away with some sort of low-bandwidth muffler device, that's not going to work unfortunately. Since there's significant low frequency content, you will need lots of mass if you want to suppress that; curtains will not help you there, but I guess will be somewhat effective in the higher frequency range.

Answered by Marcus Müller on December 19, 2021

Since you've clarified that you're trying to keep down the noise eminating out through the garage doors, consider a vinyl strip curtain of both the pedestrian and vehicle doors.

Something like this:

enter image description here
Image from strip-curtains.com, found via an eBay link. No endorsement intended or implied

Because they're flexible, they'll absorb a lot of the air movement generated by the tool motors and cutters (the source of sound), but because they're individual strips, they'll allow the wind to push them around some to allow some cooling air flow. Some...

You may have to put up some sort of horizontal track like a vertical blind to move them out of the way when you need to use the garage door for silly things like parking a car. (You'd have to move the tools out of the way, you sure you want to do that?)

Answered by FreeMan on December 19, 2021

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