Craig’s Crafts

I was cruising the Internet the other night and did that thing where you start off on one topic and gradually wander off onto something completely different. I was looking up rail guns, just out of curiosity, and ended up on wooden toy trains. Most of the links were sales pages about Brio, Thomas the Tank Engine, etc., but reading The Wooden Railway Page reminded me of all the good times I had with my trains when I was a kid. They were some of my favorite toys, along with my wooden blocks. After some filtering of Google’s results, I found some really good information about making not just the trains, but the track as well. Another good site is
Hoogerland National Railways.

Worth looking into.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t done a thing in my shop since November, unless you count the “Christmas tree” I made.

We don’t have any kids in the house to nag us to death about getting a tree and our dogs aren’t any help in motivating us to get one. They always seem surprised that they have new toys on Christmas morning, even after the big decoration session of the night before.

In any event, it was Christmas Eve, we had no tree, so I took a couple or three 1×2s, split them and made a triangular outline of a tree. Adding a few (6) strings of red lights from Walgreens, and viola, a tree. Sort of.

The camera flash exaggerates the light color of the frame, but in normal room light it was masked by the red lights. Next year my wife wants me to re-do it, more in the shape of a tree than a triangle.  I’m  not looking forward to un- and re-winding 600 lights.

Here’s a couple of pictures of the final version. Basically it’s just a box, measured and cut to fit directly behind the blade. The left side, looking from the front, extends about 4″ down past the frame of the saw. A single plastic knob and bolt with a piece of wood beneath the knob that clamps against the extension to hold it in place. I cut two “flaps” to help guide the sawdust toward the intake port.The white strip is a piece of 1/4″ hardboard pin-nailed (no glue) right through the aluminum flaps to hold them in place. The left side flap is hard to see, as it’s much narrower than the right one. Blue painter’s tape was used to cover the edges of both flaps, so I wouldn’t get cut if I bumped against it. I bored a 4″ hole to attach a short adapter (See It’s just a 15 minute job) that my dust collector connects to via a quick-connect adapter.

Most of the dust is sent straight back by the blade and very little comes out of the port on top of the blade housing, which is aimed straight back at the 4″ intake. With this and my Portable Air Cleaner made from Box Fan going, I’m in Fat City.

So I started to build my dust collector for my radial-arm saw (RAS), and began to get together the materials to build it. This shouldn’t take long, after all, it was just a small box with a hole cut in it. The wood was no problem, and I had plenty of 4″ hose to make the short connector, and then I pulled out the 4″ OD plastic pipe I had found last summer laying beside the road. It had been set aside for just this type of project, and after trueing up the end, I cut off a 5″ section to become the adapter end that my Jet dust collector (DC) needs.

That’s when I found out I had rescued a 4.5″ pipe.

No problem, I’ll just cut a slice out of the pipe, squeeze it together, and with the help of some HVAC tape and a couple of hose clamps, I’ve got my 4″ connector.

I did a few high school Geometry calculations, and figured out the circumference of a 4″ pipe should be 12.5″. All I had to do was mark off 12.5″ around the 4.5″ pipe, remove the excess, and when pressed together, I’ve got a 4″ pipe.

Ever try to roll a piece of slick plastic pipe across your workbench and not have it slip? I solved the measuring problem by borrowing my wife’s measuring tape from her sewing basket (it really was a basket!), and using that to mark my cuts.

Since I had always intended to make short connector adapters for all my tools that could be hooked up to the Jet DC, I cut three more slices from the pipe, marked them up and then used my bandsaw to remove the required slices.

Then I got out the tape, cut a 8″ section and tried bending the pipe into the smaller circumference. This is a three, or better yet, a four handed job. That pipe didn’t want to bend to my will, to I decided to weaken it. As you can see in the photos, I went back to the bandsaw and made a series of shallow cuts. This isn’t quite as effective on plastic as it is on wood, but it did make it easier to bend. I could apply about 1/2 the tape, leaving the waxed paper on the rest, squeeze the pipe into shape, and then pull the rest of the waxed paper off with my teeth as I rolled the pipe against my workbench to press the tape down. It took a couple of tries at first, but ultimately I got them all done.

Then I cut the flexible 4″ pipe to about 2′ lengths, made their connections to the PVC pipe adapters, and then I began to make the wooden box for the RAS. By then it was past 7PM, so I called it a day.

Here is a couple of shots of the reduced diameter adapters: