Dust shoes that is.
I finally got a dust shoe finished up last night and I couldn’t be happier. I managed to run several unattended jobs over the past two evenings!
By unattended I mean I didn’t have to stand over the machine with the shop-vac hose in my hand. I setup the job, turned on the router and the vacuum and pressed go. Then I could wander around the basement and do other things while it ran. Bliss!
You may recall I had started to make a dust shoe a little while ago. I wasn’t happy with the plate though. I had offset the hole and it made me lose almost an inch on the Y axis. That’s the axis that is already short, and I didn’t want to give up the travel.
So I made a new plate, and bought some real vacuum hose. The new plate comes out the front and I lose a little X travel, but I have a bunch to spare there.
So here are some pictures.
From upper left clockwise we have the detachable shield, which is made of acrylic with craft foam glued around the edge using contact cement.
Next is the lower router mount with the new plate on it. You can see the larger hole for the vacuum tube.
At the bottom is the upper router mount with a new piece of acrylic screwed to it. This centers the vacuum tube and helps support it.
Here is the whole assembly on the mill. The shield is held on with velcro so I can easily pull it off to change tools and set zero.
I fought with the hose for a while before I came up with this. I mounted a large wooden dowel to the ceiling and made a carriage to slide along it. (I bored the holes in the carriage with the ShapeOko!) This seems to work pretty well. There is enough flex in the hose and rotation in the carriage to track the Y axis, and it slides pretty well to track the X axis.
Yes, the hose runs into the lamp at the end of the travel. I still need to move the lamp. But it all works pretty well and collects at least 90% of the dust now.
