[crane550]

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)

[aarggh]

I've been mulling over a "floating" dust shoe myself to improve the one I made out of plexiglass too. But I haven't come up with a really good way to do it. Some others I've seen have an upper section of plexi fixed in position to the axis or spindle, with a lower section that fits inside the upper and slides up and down as the axis is moved.

For me though it would be too easy to stick or catch something during machining, and ruin itself and/or the workpiece.

The one I have is pretty good overall, but when doing the edges it allows some waste to go past the brushes. Would be nice to really eliminate any waste being missed.

It's a hard balance to get it easy to move out of the way, while not completely obscuring the work, and have it really efficient!

cheers,
Ian

[cutter100]

This one works pretty good but I'd like to put a brush strip around the outside edge. It doesn't move with the router and with the 2hp vac it gets most all the dust. Pretty cheap too , couple all threads, 2 1x1" alum angle, some mdf and a little lexan. Still may tweak it a little more but I like it.:cheers:

[HelicopterJohn]

Hi,

Here is a link to the retrofit that I did on my Shopbot CNC Router. One of the things I did was make a dust shoe. You can see it at the 10:40 mark on the timeline of the video.

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WQ8KcTSKyQ]Shopbot PRT Electronic and Software Retrofit - YouTube[/ame]

I did considerable research and found that an adjustable plate and multiple easily removable (held in place with magnets) lower dust shoe plates with different length brushes are very desirable. Also, I found that the smaller you can make the actual dust shoe brush (mine are 4" in diameter) the better the suction will be and also when getting close to edges of the part you lose less suction.

Just something that may be of interest.

John

[bill south]

Hey Crane!
Nice dust shoe. I just finished a similar one but mine is a two piece unit with magnets to hold the bottom (brush) part. It makes access to the tool much easier and you don't have to take the whole thing off every time. That and Ger21's screen set with tool sitter makes tool changes a breeze!!! I'll try to take a pix of it tonight.
Another question, where to you get your wood for the guitar body blank? I want to make a telecaster body but the luthier wood sites are mighty proud of their blanks. It would be cheaper to build a kit but I really want to build a guitar from scratch.
Thanks.
Bill

[sped1530]

Where do you get your plans. I have a telecaster file, but I'm looking for a strat and would love a gibson sg.

[bill south]

This is the design I used. (At least I hope the pix shows up)! As I mentioned, it's a two piece design based on magnets so it's very easy to work with. The top is 1/2" plexiglass mounted to the spindle motor and the bottom is wood (I ran out of plexiglass). Hope it is useful to someone!
Bill