But on to more serious things. Despite my best intentions, I couldn’t leave the “temporary” silver vac connector setup that I munted with the hot air gun go without replacing it, and I had time while sorting out a few other things.
… like the cam clamp delete on the Makita. Happy with that:-
And then the elephant in the room. The one which I’ve stated about a dozen times I’m going to ignore, then don’t. Bear with me here!
The Makita base is designed with the standard Vac attachment in mind - The vac fits to the open bit on the side of the base, and router cooling air combines with the vac presumably to suck “everything” up through that tiny “keyhole” in the base. The base is sculpted on the inside to assist with this airflow. I have no idea how effective this is, but an engineer at Makita has presumably thought it was a good thing.
I have printed and initially installed @frederik 's replacement for @vicious1 Ryan’s “vacduct” part which was designed for the DeWalt. I may be treading on thin ice here and certainly don’t want to cause any offence to anyone, but there are subtle differenced between the DeWalt and Makita airflow designs. I will eventually be running some actual comparison tests between that base and my version as best I can to determine if there’s a difference between fine dust particles captured, but for now, here’s my logic for reinventing the wheel before I’ve even fired up the router.
Firstly with the existing design - exhaust air is severely restricted. In operation as a router this would never be a problem as it would rarely be operated at it’s minimum height.
This obviously hasn’t cause anyone any problem as I haven’t seen any reports of dead Makitas! It’s the air intake that has me intrigued - that vent will no doubt assist in providing air intake to the Vac when the base is at its lowest, but will it make any difference to performance at other times, and will it actually let fine dust particles out into the negative pressure zone created by the conflict with the router exhaust?
Only time and probably more detailed measuring than I am capable of will tell!
What I’ve made today is a plug for the base that allows a much greater room for exhaust air, and cleans up the flow entirely on the base. Since as far as I can tell the DeWalt does not have any air inlet - performance should be no worse than the stock setup for the DeWalt.
Here’s a rendering of the model because the print is a bit less clear. Basically it’s a tap fit, but goes in on an angle so that the “big end” is held with the little flange, and the “small end” is held in position by the base. The small gap at the “small end” is intentional to allow the tilt of the piece as it’s being installed, hopefully with just enough friction on the ends to allow the “tap” without breaking the part, and it ends up being covered by the base plate at any rate.
Both Frederik and Ryan’s parts are stupidly well fitting, so it was a pretty high bar, but I think I made it - now to see if it works (eventually!)