After the first uses of MPCNC I knew: I need something to get that dust away from spreading all over my workshop.
As I am using the Makita RT0700 and there is no part at the bottom, where I can connect the dust shoe to, I had to find I different way.
I researched a litte, watched some youtube videos, found good ideas and a project on thingiverse, that was a huge inspiration, but not exactly what I wanted, so I sat down to Fusion 360 to draw it myself.
There were 2 features, that I wanted:
it has to be adjustable in height.
i want to see the milling bit and see if everything is working good
The shoe itself contains of 2 pieces of 6mm plywood (I wanted to use the CNC instead of printing everything, just to learn).
The left circle is where the mill is located. the right one fits the 40mm aluminium tube I have, that I connect the vacuum cleaner to. The hole at the front is where a piece of plexiglas will sit, so I can see whats going on.
This was the first time, I was able to use the clamps I created and see if they work. It turned out, that there worked great. The Plywood is a left over of a previous model airplane build.
Now I am ready to glue the pieces together and testfit it together with the ABS printed pieces to attach everything to the mill.
Today I will see, if I find a cheap broom with soft bristles as well as cut the plexiglas for the window.
And I need to find a way to clamp the shoe to the aluminium tube. I will print something for it.
I used foamed rubber for the first prototype yesterday, because Sergej in the Facebook group mentioned that, and I had some at home. Even that I didn’t “close the window” yet, it really works great!
But I also found some things I want to improve, so there will be a version 2 soon.
It works great that way, but has one issue: The dust shoes wood hits the knobs of the clamps, when I am near the bottom of the working material. As my bristles have arrived, I am working on the next version, that is hanging a little higher. I tried to cut it from transparent plastic (some polycarbonite), but that didn’t work well. I think I moved to slow and had the router turn to fast, because it was a really big mess
So, 3 weeks in, I want to give some feedback. I was too lazy to write down everything but here are my conclusions:
The Dustshoe with brushes didn’t work out as I wanted. The brushes are to rigid and moved my workpiece once. The price of them and the pain to get it glued into the shoe itself were not worth it.
Making the dustshoe big with a window is a nice idea, but not that practical in daily use. I found out, that even with the window, I am not able to position the bit to its correct zero location, so I had to remove it for the initial placement. On top of that, the size does matter As I have knobs to screw down the clamps, that might collide with the dust shoe, bigger shoe means bigger problems
Foamed rubber is working really really great, is cheap and easy to work with!
And one more thing I found out, after I forgot to mount the dustshoe before I started a job: Thats bad! I can really really recommend to build a dust shoe. it is night and day to holding the end of the vacuum to near the bit!
