My part designs require that I cut deeply (about 2.5"), so the original dust collection shoe is insufficient. I also am using a 4" vacuum hose. I ended up designing my own shoe and 3D printing it in TPU. It kinda/sorta works. Better than nothing, but it leaves quite a bit of dust on the piece.
The problem I have is that I start out needing almost 3" of “brushes” around the shoe, but towards the end those 3" brushes are way too long. Maybe I need adjustable brushes or an adjustable shoe, but I really don’t want to have to return to the CNC every few hours (my latest roughing pass was over 9 hours). I would prefer a single shoe that worked during the entire roughing pass without adjustment.
This problem must have been solved many times in the past, but a Google search did not reveal a product or a forum conversation. I would appreciate it if someone pointed me either at a product or at previous forum threads.
There are dust collection shoes that are gantry mounted. You adjust them once for a material height. The shoe stays stationary. I think PWN is one, not sure of spelling.
Thanks! I looked around and the SuckIt gantry mounted system seems to have been taken over by OneFinity, which no longer supports the Shapeoko. The PwnCNC V2 can mount to the gantry, but seems to not support 4" hoses. The PwnCNC V7 supports 4" hoses but does not mount to the gantry. My head is spinning. I could try to buy a OneFinity SuckIt and retrofit a gantry mount, but it would be much easier to find a suitable product.
I have a 4 inch dc but I reduce to 2.5 inches on my Shapeoko HDZ. This reduces the CFM at the router but the 2.5 inch is more than adequate for my needs. The 4 inch dust hose is much heavier and bulky for my needs. However I dont know how you use your machine so 4 inch may not be too much for you.
Your question was how to collect dust with deep cuts and not get the brush in the way as you approach your maximum depth. The only answer for that would be a gantry mounted dc shoe or like the suckit one that is independent of the moving router.
Keep looking till you find what you need. There are suckit clones on etsy and other sites. I had a suckit clone and did not like it. It was hard to change the bit with the two arms that are used to mount your base. That is just me because a lot of people like the suckit design.
For really deep cuts, there is no ideal solution. A Z-independent dust shoe helps, but 2.5" is deep enough that even then, dust collection won’t be great, depending on what you cut. If cutting large pockets 2.5" deep, a Z independent dust shoe would still have the bottom of the shoe at the original stock surface…2.5" above the bottom of the pocket, so by the end of the job it’s not sucking much.
Right now a PwnCNC model seems to be your best bet (probably with some adaptation required) if you want to go the “off-the-shelf” way. But since you mentioned designing and 3D-printing your own shoe, you could also design a Z-independent yourself. I’ve been down to (pretty deep) rabbit hole, and if you do have the time it takes to design and print it, it’s quite rewarding. Here’s my take on one that adapts to the HDZ 4.0, that @MarkDGaal helped me rework to accomodate the trim router instead of my bulky spindle:
The one type of dust shoe I did not experiment with yet is the “floating” kind, which may perform better for deep pockets as it can be set to have the bottom of its brushes lower than Z zero:
(automative part, supposed to protect a cardan shaft or whatever it’s called)
and the straight part of it was a good fit.
Alternatively, I forgot to mention other experiment like this one from @themillertree:
There are endless possibilities, but so far I have not (yet) found a better solution than the Z-independent, “cylindrical-sleeve-around-router” approach.
