Advice on Dust/Chip Collection for Jointer

[Mark Largent]

I bought a used Delta 37-280 Jointer (picture attached). It works great, but it throws chips and sawdust all over the floor. There's no port for a vacuum - it's open all underneath the jointer and it sprays out the chips.

I would be easy for me to box in the upper half of the stand to create a box into which all the chips/dust could collect. I could make it smaller with a hole on either end for a vacuum attachment and an air inlet. Or, I could make it larger with a drawer that I could just empty.

Suggestions? Advice? Anybody done this? Am I missing something here?

[Andy Pratt]

Some of the common woodworking internet retailers offer generic plastic dust collection mounts that could be easily attached underneath this. Seems like most were a 4" port and cost in the $20-30 range for the sizes appropriate for this. You would have a few gaps but could get away with wood, glue and duct tape if you're looking for an easy solution. You could also build your own box (I'd recommend one tapering down to a dust collection fitting at the bottom (think inverted pyramid) and put a $5-10 hose attachment fitting at the base. Given the large amount of chips that jointing produces I wouldn't want to be emptying a box by hand, and it would tend to pyramid up anyway and clog before it was mostly full, making you open it and spread it out within the box fairly often I think, so I wouldn't recommend a non-dust collector option. If you made a full-footprint, full-height cabinet that became the new base that would be more along the size box that you might be okay with emptying once in a while.