Dust Shoe Revisit
Well, the machine is working splendidly, so I decided it was about time to cut a new dust shoe for the bigger dust collector hose. To that end, I ordered up some half-inch thick acrylic online. It came in earlier this week, so today I clamped it down and cut out my new dust collector shoe.
Here it is, hot (literally) off the table. The paper is purely for protection from scratches.
Here is a view of the edge, after cutting. I am quite impressed with the quality of the cut. This was done with a 1/4 inch 2-flute up-spiral bit, running at about 22000 rpm, taking off 0.05 inches per pass.
Here is the shoe without the paper. It's very nice.
Now the bad news. After peeling off the paper, I got to looking at the iece and thinking that it did not look quite right. So I got out my calipers and measured the diameter of the inside holes. Low-and-behold, they're all half an inch too big! It turns out that I accidentally cut outside the circle in the plans, rather than inside.Thus, since the bit is 1/4 inch, the hole is 1/2 inch too big.
So, now I have to come up with a new piece of acrylic. So, unless I can find someone locally who has the sutff (unlikely), there goes $14 + S&H. Sigh. At least it cuts nicely.