I was really getting tired of holding the vacumm hose all the time, so I threw together something a few weeks ago. I managed to burn out a stepper driver last time, but discovered that was due to over-tightening one of the adjustment bolts. Last night I put this system back together and ran some test cuts. It’s working quite well now.
Ignore the chatter during the cut. This was a test design I was using to try different DOC and feed rates… pretty much a worst-case test to see how things held up.
[youtube]https://youtu.be/EPafcxfaL8E[/youtube]
If you look closely, You’ll see the duct tape on the back of the container where I started with the hole on the side. Redneck engineering at its finest.
I just discovered my router is blowing down on the workpiece sending dust everywhere.
I think this might be a good place to start, as it’s about at my level of engineering
I believe I’ll need to add a rim of bristles or foam, as there will be lots of pressure pushing dust out of the sides otherwise.
Thanks for sharing. Is anyone able to pass judgement on whether the mounting scheme in this design will exhibit any pull on the cutting head leading to accuracy issues?
It looks like you have it cable tied onto the gantry, so that’s ok, right?
Gave me a reason to play around with fusion 360. The mount wasn’t for this router, so I had to close up the holes a tad, and open them up a tad for the pvc pipe. Look around on thingiverse for one that’s close to your router, it might fit without too much modification. Try not to have too much pipe sticking up. I eventually shortened mine down to the power cord level. Though it helps that my hose is hanging off the ceiling so not too much lateral forces in the first place.
Having looked a bit on here and Thingiverse, I’ve seen many instances of attaching near the base of the router which makes sense to minimise the pull.
And as you say Barry the hose hanging from above will help too. Its interesting to hear it doesn’t cause any problems for you.
I can start with the shop vac and a plastic bottle, but I’m keen to attach the 4" dust extractor rather than the shop vac, so erring on the side of Ryan’s point of view about not touching Z because of the weight and forces of the bigger hose. It will obviously need height adjustment separately from the z height in response to the material height.
The point about the bristles in my case is the router is acting as a strong downward blower, so without something touching the work piece, the dust will really try to fly everywhere. My first cut was chipboard rather than wood, so I didn’t get chips so much as a fine dust.
I ended up taking this back off as it just added too much drag to the Z axis. I think hanging the hose from above so that it fell loose would be much better than what I did.
The Z axis seems to be able to take the weight of the tube itself, it’s the tug on the hose that seems to cause my problems.
I have the fan for the router above the little plastic bottle. This keeps the fan from blowing the chips around and allows the suction from the vacuum to pull the chips up and through the bottle. Adding bristles would probably help some as well.
Another issue I have is that the bottle is a little too tall. When cutting a full 3/4" depth, the bottle drags on the top of the work surface. It’s plastic, so it doesn’t hurt much, but still… If it ever hung on a lip of something it might cause issues.
I ended taking it back off. I keep telling myself I’m going to 3d print or CNC cut a real one, just haven’t done it yet. I really want to design one that would have the hose mount to the X-Y gantry itself and then have some type of small hose going to the extraction point around the router. The hard part is finding a hose that is soft enough for the Z movement but still hard enough that it doesn’t collapse when the shop vac is turned on. My next attempt will have the hose suspended above the machine somehow to remove that weight from the axis too. Basically I only want the weight of the dust shoe itself to be on the Z axis.
