Hey all, I have not been around in a while, mostly because I have been busy with school. Still using the big CNC a lot for my guitar making. The dust was getting to me so I decided it was finally time to make a dust boot. (well, actually, "I didn't build that, someone else did." )
I ordered the skirt from McMaster, got a slab of plexi at the local plastics supplier, and some aluminum for milling the mounts. I milled the mounts on my vertical mill instead of the CNC as is was just easier with the setup.
Anyways, its all together, but looks.....big. I took a lot of care with the mount and getting that right, but I will probably redo the plexi part in a bit. With the bigness I don't know if it will suck up all the large chips as well as it should. What it DOES get it the fine particles, which was mostly the goal. It also keep the big chips from flying everywhere, even if they didn't make it all the way into the dust collector.
Anyways, thats it. Just thought I would share. My needs are kinda weird casue I span well over two inches in my Z travel for normal use. This makes dust collection a bit more tricky then it would be if I was just cutting 3/4" goods all the time. Any ideas on improving this would be welcome.
Also, I have kinda thought it would be cool if the dust shoe connected to the statinoary section of the Z, and did not move up and down with the router. This would be cool, as you could manually set the height of the brushes, which would STAY there during the whole cut, and would not get bogged down as the router got further down into the work peice. Any ideas on that?
Yes, it means scrapping my beautiful newly milled (quite nicely, if I might say to myself) hardware for a new bracket, but no big deal in my book. I'm going to chew on this one for a while.
(To be replaced with a knob instead of bolt)