Vaccum in place of muffler?

[Rick P]

I been running with a small shop vac hose inserted in the spot where the CW muffler goes. I run the shop vac during the carve, especially when it's going to be a real dust producing project.

Is this OK ? Anything I am missing ??

[pkunk]

I been running with a small shop vac hose inserted in the spot where the CW muffler goes. I run the shop vac during the carve, especially when it's going to be a real dust producing project.

Is this OK ? Anything I am missing ??

Most shop vacs are not designed for such continuos duty. You will let the smoke out of the motor, DAMHIK. Shop Vac does make a 2 stage motor but expect to pay $300 or so for one. It won't hurt the Carvewright (actually is more cooling for the motor), but really won't collect much more dust from the carving area. I've done it, but I have a 2 stage shop vac.

[want2b]

From what others have posted and my experience, you are wasting your time connecting a vacuum there. I'm not 100% sure on the engineers design but it seems to me to be more of an air movement connection for cooling than cleanliness.
Try doing a search on several things, vacuum, dust collector, or similiar topics and you will find a lot of threads posted by members on how they solved the cleaning issue. I've read most of them and ended up using a combination. I initially built a bottom connection that fit with the stand I had bought. Then when I saw the one that attached under the 'lid' I built one that worked there. Now I use both, similar to others in the forum. I use my shop vac for one and my DC for the other trying to maximize the cleaning. My upper connection is set up to vacuum the whole width of the machine and I cover the opening to match the width of the board. The lower I use as is, the wider the board the less it helps. Basically, I would suggest reading all the postings, deciding which fits your economic situation along with your ability to fabricate and go from there. I believe there is a post where a member makes a collector for sale.
Mine is probably not the best, I still have some dust but it's at a minimum after a 4 hour carve.
Good luck, you're only limited by yuor imagination.
Rick H.

[SAA3840]

I built a down-draft box that is connected to my shop vacuum and it works quite well. The cut-motor exhaust is directed into the down-draft box using a piece of vacuum cleaner hose. See the pictures I've posted.

It doesn't stay any cleaner by running the exhaust into the down-draft, but it does quiet it down a bit.

[Rick P]

Thank you for the comments on my post ... I did not mention that I do have a down draft box under my CW that is connected to my Delta dust collector.
It stays very clean inside unless I am doing a deep, detailed carving in a 14 inch wide board.

Based on the the comments I believe my shop vac connected to the muffler port is NOT adding much cleaning action.

A down draft system and the ROCK chuck are two modifications all CW users should have...at least for users who do more than 1 or 2 projects a month.