Sunday, October 8, 2023

Optimizing the vacuum adapter

Both of my Makita jigsaw and Makita sander have the same sized vacuum suction nozzles, and I use them quite a bit. The cheap Makita sander kicks up a lot of dust and short of buying another premium near-dustless sander for $500 (e.g. the 3M Xtract), I decided to just hook it up to my Festool Vacuum. I tried various universal adapters but none of them were to my likings, so I decided to custom design and 3D print my own. I went through several iterations and finalized on the smallest/lightest version. Below is my first version
This first version is a nice fitting test on the tubes. However, it's pretty long and clunky to use, so I designed another version where the vacuum length is reduced.
Picture to the left is the initial version, progressing to the right: I kept reducing the excess adapter size and at some point, I made the realization that Makita's smaller nozzle's outer diameter could simply fit inside the inner diameter of the Festool vacuum line:
Finally,
This is the final version, which is the lightest and easiest to work in tight spots due to the short length of the adapter:
In retrospect, it should have been pretty obvious to design the optimal adapter from the very beginning -- the outer diameter of the smaller nozzle fits inside the inner diameter of the vacuum tube. Hindsight!