Saturday, September 1
Custom Coaxial Dust Collector Makes CNC Router a Clean Machine
Everyone loves firing up that CNC router for the first time. But if the first thing you cut is wood, chances are good that the second thing you cut will be parts for some kind of dust shroud. Babysitting the machine and chasing the spindle around with a shop vac hose probably isn’t why you got it in the first place, right?
Trouble is, most dust-management designs just don’t get the job done, or if they do, they obstruct your view of the tool with a brush or other flexible shroud. [Jeremy Cook] figured he could do better with this coaxial dust collector, and from the practically dust-free cuts at the end of the video below, we think he’s right. The design is a two-piece, 3D-printed affair, with a collar that attaches to the spindle and a separate piece containing the duct. The two pieces stick together with magnets, which also lets the shroud swivel around for optimal placement. The duct surrounds the collet and tool and has a shop vac hose connection. In use, the vacuum pulls a ton of air through small opening, resulting in zero dust. It also results in the occasional part sucked up from the bed, so watch out for that. [Jeremy] has published the STL files if you want to make your own.
We’re pretty impressed, but if you still feel the need for a physical shroud, check out this shaggy-dog design that seems to work well too. Or you could just throw the whole thing in an enclosure.
Salvaging an Ancient, Dangerous Machine With Wood
What do you do when you have a gigantic old drum sander with a bent table? Scrapping it will give you a few cents per pound, but this machine is just too cool, and would be too useful to just throw away. That’s when inspiration strikes. To fix this old machine, [Frank Howarth] built a new bed for an old drum sander out of wood.
The machine in question is a Frank H. Clement Surface Sanding Machine from the early part of the 20th century. This machine is basically a 30 inch long, 14 inch diameter drum that’s wrapped in sandpaper. There are removable tables for this machine, and basically what we’re looking at here is a jointer that can handle 30-inch wide boards, only it’s a sander. [Frank] picked up this machine way back in 2015 from a friend for free, but everything has a cost. There’s a problem with this sander: one of the previous owners stored a heavy jointer on the table, and the hefty iron bed was bent down in the middle. This makes the vintage surface sanding machine absolutely useless for anything. A new bed would have to be constructed.
[Frank] is a master craftsman, though, and he has enough scrap wood sitting around to build just about anything. After taking some careful measurements of the frame of the sander, he cut and glued up a few large panels of a glueLam beam, salvaged from an earlier operation. This beam is tremendously strong, and resawing and gluing it up into a panel produced a very hefty board that’s perfect for the bed of a gigantic, ancient surface sanding machine.
The actual fabrication of the new bed happened on [Frank]’s CNC router. The bottom of the bed was easy enough to fit to the cast iron frame, but there was an issue: because these tables are meant to butt up against a spinning drum, [Frank] needed to cut away a cove underneath the table. A CNC router can easily do this, but apparently the glueLam beam couldn’t handle it — a bit of the edge split off. These panels are basically made of glue, though, and some quick action with a few clamps saved the project.
The bed for this sander is now done, and a change in the pulley brought the speed of the drum down to something reasonable. Of course, this is a woodworking machine from the early 1900s, and safety was a secondary concern. We’re not worried, though. [Frank] still has all his fingers. A guard for the belt is in the works, though.
$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft
Lenovo
Among the new hardware launched this week at IFA in Berlin are a couple of premium Chromebooks. Lenovo's $600 Yoga Chromebook brings high-end styling and materials to the Chromebook space, along with well-specced internals and a high quality screen. Dell's $600 Inspiron Chromebook 14 has slightly lower specs but is similarly offering better styling, bigger, better quality screens, and superior specs to the Chromebook space.
These systems join a few other premium Chromebooks already out there. HP's Chromebook x2 is a $600 convertible hybrid launched a few months ago, and Samsung has had its Chromebook Plus and Pro systems for more than a year now. And of course, Google's Pixelbook is an astronomically expensive Chrome OS machine.
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