Thread: 8" Disk Sander New Vac Connection.

I have an Axminster brand 1" belt sander with an 8" disk sander built in. I know that I can't offend the designer of the dust pickup system, because I'm sure he or she have moved on to collecting mail in a much bigger company by now, but it's suffice to say it's not worth having. In fact I don't think it was coincidence that the smoke came out of my old Shopvac while connected to this wretched thing.

Here's the problem:

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The "collector" is a flat sheet of metal that appears to be left over from a meat slicer, with about 5mm of clearance from the disk. The vac fitting terminates at right angles through a rectangular fitting that is about one third of the area of the vacuum hose, and draws from a little void behind the face of the disk. I am not sure how it picked anything up, but I'm going to give it credit for about 20% of the dust.

Therefore the sander gets little use, but it's really handy particularly when I'm playing with PVC, but I've really got to want to clean up after using it!

As an aside - the clear plastic vac adapter is a PET water bottle cut and heat shrunk. This has been my preferred adaptation method for around 20 years, but I suspect custom printed ones will take over in the near future.

Inspired by @BobL's monster PVC pipe affair, but with no way of connecting this machine to the DC, and really it's a bit too small for that anyway, I decided to start from scratch to allow proper air flow across and into the system. The truncation is to allow for the tilting of the table top, but is probably pretty fortuitous in terms of making a clear airway.:

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I'm very new to CAD and to 3D modelling in particular, so in a way this was biting off more than I could chew, but was keen to design something that could be 3d printed simply. The idea is to allow the full suck from the vacuum, and by intersecting at an angle I get a nice crescent shaped cutout, which has a larger area under the table surface, and trails away as the disk rotates. Here's the finished product off the printer. Needless to say I'm pretty chuffed with it as a modelling and printing exercise at least, but how does it work?

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REALLY WELL!

Leaving aside the argument about fine dust for a moment (in this location that is problematic, but assisted by having a ceiling mounted air filter nearby), almost all visible dust was collected in my first (short) trial, making me wonder why the manufacturer didn't go to just a few hours' more drafting time.

I might even be tempted to use this on timber in the future...This is the first of what I expect to be a number of upgrades using 3d printing. The cost for this one was around $4.00 so I can probably afford to experiment. Next: maybe the pickup on the belt sander side, which is an even bigger disaster if that's even possible!

Cheers,

P