The best place for the OMTech laser cutter seems to be snuggled at base of the chimney, venting into the long-disused fireplace through the steel plate adapting a long-gone wood stove to the opening:
The short run of flexible tubing allows some give-and-take at the cutter’s vent outlet. The elbow on the duct fan’s output terminates in a blast gate to cut off the draft blowing up (or down!) the flue with the fan off.
The cutter arrived with a huge high-speed axial blower screwed to its output baffle:
The noise from that fan had to be heard to be believed.
The cylindrical exhaust duct attached directly to the motor with four screws, only two of which matched holes in the baffle plate:
A trial fit revealed the assembly rattled something awful: those two screws let the duct vibrate against the baffle. Match-drilling two more holes into the baffle let me mount the duct with three screws and, in combination with the foam gasket, it is now solid and quiet.
A quick check shows the duct fan draws 10 to 11 m/s through the baffle at full throttle, roughly 400 CFM. That’s pretty close to the flow measured through a long pipe and, with only 6 ft³ of stink inside the laser’s cabinet, ought to exhaust the fumes just fine.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
This seems like a pretty big addition to the shop. What are your plans for it?
It’s a great way to cut intricate shapes from large-ish nonmetallic sheets and mark their surfaces: widget cases & front panels, quilting rulers & patterns, slide rules & cursors, stuff like that.
Might not make economic sense, particularly given my utter lack of entrepreneurial mojo, but it will definitely keep me off the streets at night …
“Might not make economic sense”
That describes pretty much everything I own.