I had an idea about how to make a simple, economical, yet effective dust collection system for my C-Beam machine. Should work equally well on just about any build, and it uses 5 or 6 dollars worth of parts. Turns out it's very effective, picking up 95% of the dust and shavings. First thing I did was to get some fittings for a central vac system from my local big box store. I used a couple of 45 degree elbows and a couple of short pieces of 2" central vac pipe. I actually had this stuff left over from the system I installed in my shop a while back. I also used a 1 1/2" sink drain adapter and a 1 1/2" renovators cap for ABS drain pipe. Last item was a plastic clamp used to secure the 2" pipe to the wall or ceiling. I cut a small length of pipe for the pickup at the bottom, and a piece about the same length as the router for the main tube. I assembled these into a 45 degree elbow. I then cut the lower piece of pipe off at 90 degrees to the vertical pipe, for clearance above the work. I then cut it parallel to the vertical pipe as close as possible to the router chuck. This makes a V-shaped end on the pipe with the vertical part of the v parallel to the cutter, and the horizontal part of the V parallel to the table. Then, I placed another 45 degree elbow at the top of the vertical pipe, and used the renovators cap ( which is just an orange cap put over ABS pipe during construction to keep debris out of the pipe ) as a shim. The 1 1/2" sink drain fitting is like a compression fitting, and it just happens to fit nicely onto the vacuum hose fittings on my central vac system. It has a nut that you can tighten up to lock the fitting inside. However, the ABS OD is not compatible with the vacuum tubing's inner diameter. I cut the end off the renovators cap, so it was just a tube. It fits perfectly over the ABS male 1 1/2" fitting, and provides exactly the right shim thickness to make the 1 1/2" fitting fit perfectly into the vacuum tube elbow. You can see it as the orange collar in the first photo. The last step was to mount the whole thing on the router mount. I was looking at it to see how I could make a mount, when I remembered the u-clamps that are used to mount the vacuum pipe to walls and joists. Lo and behold, the hole spacing on the u-clamp is exactly the same as the screw spacing on the router mount clamp. So, I just put in 2 longer screws, and screwed the clamp with the tube in it to the front of the router mount. The whole thing took me 15 minutes to build and it works like a hot dang. I just plug the vacuum hose into the top of the "dust shoe", and go to work. It works really well, picking up almost all of the router cuttings and dust. It took me longer to write this up than it did to make it. MG
Home Depot, same as the rest of the fittings. They are just clamps used to mount built in vac tubing to framing. MG
what do you do for 100 present pick up ? what is the solution for that? thank you Richard Westerfield
I assume you mean 100 percent pickup? Well, no method is perfect. Any system will always miss some of the dust and chips. A dust shoe like the one shown below would probably do a better job, but cost a lot more and still miss some. The only method I know that would do better is you standing there with a vacuum hose manually vacuuming up the chips.
