How to easily make a vacuum port for the central shop vac system

Friday, March 18, 2016

How to easily make a vacuum port for the central shop vac system


Description

The previous vacuum port design was less complicated than blast gates but still took a bit of work. Today Harley shows how to make a new and improved design that is much faster to make and easier to use.

How to quiet a shop vac

For a written transcript, go to How to easily make a vacuum port for the shop vac

Music under Creative Commons License By Attribution 3.0.
Intro/Exit: "Hot Swing" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Incidental: “Private Eye" by Kevin MacLeod at http://incompetech.com
Sound effects: living-room-light-switch by alienxxx at http://freesound.org

Transcript

In my video about “How to quiet a shop vac” I showed how I made hose connection ports modeled after a house central vac system. Today at the House of Hacks, I’m going to show a "new and improved” design that is simpler and faster to make.

[Music]

Hi Makers, Builders and Do-it-yourselfers. Harley here.

After making the first couple ports for my central vac shop system, I was perusing the plumbing department at the local home improvement store and saw these connectors.

They’re rubber couplers to go between two 2” rigid pipes with hose clamps on both sides. I realized they were the right diameter for the vacuum hose so I picked up a couple of them, along with some 45 degree connectors.

Back in the shop I cut a short piece of pipe and glued it into one side of the 45 degree elbow.

I attached the rubber connector to the other side and tightened the hose clamp down tight.

The other hose clamp I adjusted so the vacuum hose was a snug fit but could still be removed.

I trimmed the corners off a 4x4 and put it in the lathe.

Next I turned it into a tapered plug that fit into the coupler with a snug fit.

Finally I connected a chain to the plug so it wouldn’t wander off too far and get lost.

All told, I spent about 1 hour on this, including the trip to the home store. If you did an assembly line, you could make a bunch of these in pretty short order. This is by far much a much easier port to make than my previous design.

In conclusion, I’d love to hear in the comments about a time a designed of yours evolved over time.

If this is your first time here at House of Hacks: Welcome, I’m glad you’re here. We’d love to have you subscribe. I believe everyone has a God-given creative spark and through this channel I hope to inspire, educate and encourage makers in their creative endeavors. Usually this involves various physical media like wood, metal, electronics, photography and shop projects like this one. If this sounds interesting to you, go ahead and subscribe and I’ll see you again in the next video.

Thanks for joining me on our creative journey. Now, go make something. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just have fun!