Much cheaper than a $400 vac is a shop made adjuster for you airflow. Variation would depend on your vac and connector dimensions. Find a piece of PVC pipe or an old fixture/vac-tool that matches your connecting point at the vac's intake. Cut a slot (or rectangular hole) in your coupler.
Shop Vac Bleeder (4).jpg
Slip the "c-clip" over the hole.
Shop Vac Bleeder (6).jpg
Rotate for infinite control of your flow.
Shop Vac Bleeder (7).jpg
"A hen is only an egg's way of making another egg".
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This is why we pay you the big bucks, Glenn!
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
[OP]
Member
David and Glenn, I may have to try something like a blast gate or a gap in the hose.
Art, my planer is a DW 735 and the issue is that it is leaving little ridges in a few places. I have rotated the blades and it is still doing the same thing, hence the need to sand. I thought it was normal since it did it straight from the box.
And I am very new to fine woodworking so I trying to learn, so far mostly from making errors.
Last edited by Paul F Mills; 04-27-2019 at 8:27 PM.
Moderator
Paul, the other reason you want to be able to control the level of vacuum from extraction is that as you get to finer and finer abrasives, the ROS will start to get "sticky" and harder and harder to move around smoothly. Reducing vacuum helps mitigate that but it doesn't negatively affect extraction of the finer-fines, as it were.
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The most expensive tool is the one you buy "cheaply" and often...
Member
Paul,
"Art, my planer is a DW 735 and the issue is that it is leaving little ridges in a few places. I have rotated the blades and it is still doing the same thing, hence the need to sand. I thought it was normal since it did it straight from the box."
You can shift the blades sideways in the little slots to remove ridges and not rotate them. If you shift one or two of them the ridges left by one blade can then be planned smooth by the following blade Of course, as the blades become more chipped there will be a point when the ridges can no longer be removed this way. Then it's time for new blades, or if the blades are double edged, maybe it's time to reverse the blade to use the other edge. With a 735 you can get creative, rotating or shifting one or two blades to find a combination where the chipped edges are not the same in all three blades. I hone my blades and shift them frequently to get maximum life out of them, but there is a point where it's just smarter to replace them. I've considered the Infinity carbide, but then a friend converted his 735 to a helix and sold me his 3 sets of spare blades cheap. I doubt that I'll ever go helix, but with these new blades my decision point to go either helix or carbide has been shifted out several years.
Charley
Contributor
What I did was plug my shop vac into a "router speed control". The motor in the shop vac is a universal motor, same as your router. That way, you can adjust the amount of vacuum by just turning the speed control knob.
If you add one of those controls that sense when you turn your sander on, you can have the best of both worlds.
Mike
[Here's a pix of my setup. The speed was on high when I took the pix. A lot less expensive than purchasing a new vacuum with those features.]
Sanding-station2.jpg
Last edited by Mike Henderson; 04-28-2019 at 10:52 AM.
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[OP]
Member
Charles,
i rotated them and am still getting the ridges in a few areas. I also wiped the rollers clean. Any other reasons that I could be getting ridges? I cannot feel any imperfections in the blades.
[OP]
Member
That is a great idea, Mike.
Member
Rotate (to me) means turning the blades end for end, or flipping them over to use the second edge. This is not what I am suggesting. Look carefully at the blades and you will see some oval slots in several places between the screw holes. When you are installing these blades there are little pin shaped protrusions in the blade mount that fit into the oval holes in the blade. If you loosen the blade mounting bolts you can slide the blade a small amount left of right because of these oval holes.Originally Posted by Paul F Mills
If you get a nick in all three blades in the same exact position, you can slide one or two of the blades a slight amount so that the ridge left by the nick in one blade is then cut away by one of the other blades that you have shifted. This gets you a bit longer use of the blades before you need to change to the second edge or replace them. Some nicks in the blades are very hard to see, especially when they are still mounted in the planer. It doesn't take much of a nick to leave a lengthwise ridge on your work, but all three blades likely have the same imperfection in the blade and all in line with each other for the ridge to be continuous.
Charley
Contributor
If you're doing just a natural finish then sanding to finer grits (like 400) is fine. However, if you are staining a project, sanding to anything higher than 150 grit will likely not let the stain soak in adequately. It depends on what the wood is and what type of stain or dye you're using, but you should experiment with test wood sanded to higher grits to see if the staining result will be what you want.
Just from my experience, with a good random orbit sander, you would have to be trying to level a glue joint or have a very rough surface to require starting at 80 grit. Usually 100 or 120 is a good place to start. However, I don't know what your surface looks like when you start sanding.
Also, it's my understanding that plywood (like baltic birch and hardwood veneered) is already sanded to 120 so starting below that is counter-productive and you run the risk of sanding through the veneer.
[OP]
Member
I do understand the rotate vs slide. My point is that I checked the knives and could not discern a notch so I rotated them to try a new edge but had the same results.
Contributor
Thank you for that lead! I'm already loyal to Rhyno and didn't know about this source. I see them only up to 400 grit for Festool but no higher. But no worries, I can go to another pattern for 600 grit. Seems to me at that point you're polishing more than sanding, and there's less volume of dust.
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