So, I was planning on adding a dust shoe to my build, to assist the vacuum cleaner.
But doing 3 cuts today made me realize that’s not a desired option.
I mean, my bit was like 2,5cm long, and the wood 1,8 thick, and the table isn’t completely flat (±3mm difference), so there’s actually little to no place to add a vac shoe and keep working like that.
Watching the LR2 doing it’s thing, I realized that adding the vac mouth only to one side doesn’t make sense without a vac shoe. So if you’re still going to experiment, I’d make the suggestion to go from one large vac port to 4 smaller ones, each one positioned on one side of the router.
This way I believe you could keep the vacuum flow unchanged, but by tunneling and sucking away air on 4 places it might remove more dust.
Wdyt?
I think that the whole base plate on the LR is something of a dust shoe.
If you are concerned about dust and less concerned with chips – ie: it’s your breathing that you’re worried about, and not keeping the workpiece clear of chips. then so long as there’s an inward flow from all sides of the plate, you’re going to get pretty good performance.
Rather than redesign the shoe, it’s probably better to work on getting better air flow through what we’ve got. In terms of effort/reward, this is probably the biggest gain.
That’s not to say that there aren’t gains to be had in the shoe design, but having the best dust shoe in the world isn’t going to help when there just isn’t enough airflow to suck up the dust and chips.
In my case I am less concerned about the chips. That’s rather easily to clean.
But not the dust, that’s hard to clean. And for me somewhat of an issue as it covers my whole workspace with it.
I see you’re no fan of adding a dust shoe, what’s your opinion on 4 ports fitted around the Makita, instead of 1 off center?
In theory that’s a good idea I think, but I doubt that you’d get enough airflow to make a difference if you have a shopvac setup. To upgrade to a full 4" or 6" setup then smacks a bit of overkill in terms of scale but it’s what I have throughout my shed. There’s no doubt that dust is best controlled in an full enclosure - and chips can benefit from some airflow ONTO them, which is in conflict with the dust control thing.
I am way behind in many other things so will be at least a month before I can get back onto this - but keep the discussion happening! I’m THINKING! I’d love to have something to contribute to the next iteration, but based on actual data not guesses.
yeah, the theory makes sense, but would need to think through as there are many parameters.
It´s been long, I only remember something like the relation of airflow vs suction, and that a thinner tubes will pass less airflow, but larger ones don´t suck more dust.
Maybe I´ll experiment with it in the future (read; sometime in the summer holiday: )
It’s a velocity thing. You can’t get any more vacuum than 0 bar, but you can make air move stupid fast. Shop vacs are low volume high speed air, while most dust collection systems are high volume low speed. You can do high volume high speed, but they’re expensive and really loud. Another thing to consider is the size of the plate. It’s not hard to suck the whole plate down onto the work piece.
UPDATE!
I did manage to get quite a bit further down the track with a couple of options - almost to the point of buying filament, however from what I’ve seen of the LR3 “sneak previews” that setup will be streets ahead no matter how far I go with development of the LR2 base.
Therefore, I am happily using that as an excuse to abandon this for now, and then let’s see what the future brings!
