I recently broke the cover of my Drum Sander, took it of to fix and thought it a good idea to improve the flow from the piddly 2.5" to 4". I put it in a safe place while the shed extension was going on, it's in such a safe place, I can't find it!!!!!!
Anyway I needed to sand some 17mm ply for the shed cupboards and as I don't want to kill myself from the dust, I decided to make a new one. Managed to get a short piece of 150mm pipe, but I needed an end cap, the plumber mate that I got the pipe from didn't have any so it was off to the local plumbers supply, $11.70 poorer for one cap, I though about getting a 150mm - 4" T piece, which would make it easier to make, except that they wanted $75.90 for it. I decided to get just the cap and get out of there.
Getting home, I cut the end cap in half, placed it on the ends of the DS and drew the edges which needed to be cut out.
That was the easy part, next step was to cut the 150mm pipe, I marked the cut line with a piece of timber for a straigh edge and a texta. Cutting it on the bandsaw was no easy feat, in hindsight, I should have done in on the tablesaw.
Scrounged an adaptor to go down to 4" flexi size, placed it on the joins and marked them with the texta.
As this was the end piece with the expanded end, it made it relatively easy to cut the outlet holes, this was done on the bandsaw as I couldn't find my holesaws in amongst the stuff.
This was why I'm making the cabinets, so I could find things.
Then it was a matter of assembly, I used poprivets and sealant to hold it all together plus a bit of strapping, because if I used a proper adhesive I wouldn't be able to modify things if required.
I used a couple of butt hinges, that needed drilling as the hinges were missing also, to pivot the cover.
It has been suggested that a bit more airflow would be better, so I'll cut a couple of large diameter hole to improve it.
Using it, I found that it works well, cleaning up dust off the belt and not letting dust escape from the sides as what was previously happening.
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This is a ROUGH prototype to see if there would be much of an improvement, which there was.
Hopefully I'll soon have a Mk2 version.
Kryn