It Really Sucks

 So my bandsaw is equipped from the factory with a dust collection port. I do not have a dust collector, which is a roughly fridge-sized box that takes 240v of electricity and turns it into noise with the side effect of sucking dust and chips out of whatever's attached to its 4 inch pipes Absent this dust collection, the bandsaw has a tendency to produce a cloud of fine wood dust when sawing that then covers every surface in the shop, much to my annoyance.

But while I do not have a dust collector, I do have a shop vac. While this also turns electricity into noise, it does so at a much slower rate, only sucking in dust via a 1.75 inch inlet rather than the 4 inch inlet more characteristic of a proper dust collector. However, with that deficiency in mind, I decided to try to see if it would be useful to adapt the dust collection port on the bandsaw to the hose on the shop vac.

Enter: a plywood monstrosity.

This monstrosity was born into this world with a few deficiencies.

1. The plywood it's constructed out of is kind of half rotted and water damaged and falling apart.
2. The plywood it's constructed out of was never actually good in the first place.
3. The 4 inch hole is tapered. This is because I cut it out with a jigsaw, and when you cut out curves with a jigsaw the blade deflects towards the outside of the curve while you're cutting.
4. It's also just kinda ugly.

However, all those issues aside, the one thing it does do is actually work. I hooked up the shop vac and cut a few test boards and I was mightily impressed to find that pretty much all the dust got sucked up by the vacuum, despite its anemic relative performance when compared with a dust collector. I had initially hoped that it would at least collect the fine dust that tended to spread through the air a lot, but it even collected the heavier dust that usually settled around the base of the machine. Sweet.

That said, it still had issues, so to address those I did what I probably should have done in the first place and 3d printed an adapter out of black PETG.

The J-shaped cutout is to allow the bolt-and-threaded-insert to clamp down onto the outside of the dust collector port without causing stress risers in the plastic that might shatter it later. It also probably lets in a lot of air but if that becomes a problem I'll just slap some duct tape on it.

Long story short, I'm quite pleased with how this turned out and I expect that this'll make my use of this tool a lot more pleasant.