Hi, I’ve assembled my 4X10 CNC and it came time to hook up dust collection. I have a suspended ceiling so I don’t have a lot of room between the top of the gantry and the ceiling. I purchased a Rockler Ceiling track system that I saw other users put up. Turns out that is not a good solution.
If you don’t go down the center of the track the rollers will bind. This might be less of a problem the higher you ceiling is.
If you tighten the hanger, 4 inch hook in my case, and the hose twists the rollers will bind in the track.
Their track extrusion is pretty awful. The transition from one tract to the other had a large difference I had to file down.
I tried different hangers to see if I could fix the problem with no success. My final solution was to use the wire hangers I used to hang my 70ft of 6 inch dust collection tubes. I have two wires setup. One down the Y axis and the other on the X axis. I use a washer to slide the flexible hose on the wires. The wire on the Y axis is 8ft long and is attached to a 2x3 I attached to the rafters above using threaded rod. The X axis is about 6ft long and hangs form the same 2x3 as the Y axis and a 2x3 I used to anchor the end of the dust collection pipe. This works well with no interference anywhere on the table.
My “maybe next project” is an active pulley system using the VL53L5CX sensor to read the gantry position. It would look down and see the gantry and calculate the distance required to place the 4 inch hose over the spindle.
I made a similar setup to AncientCowboy’s. One difference is I have an additional swivel joint in the ductwork was well. The duct swivel joint is a 3D printed creation, and the swivel joint for the 2x4 boom rotates on a weldment using a 1" pin with HDPE bushings. It has a spring return, so it is always biased to one side. My ceiling is 7 1/2’ so the duct hanging below the boom is low enough that the cable carrier of the CNC would hit.
I was very concerned before I bought my machine that I could have a good dust collection system with my super low ceiling that didn’t require babysitting. This thing works beautifully.
I was told by Avid I could shorten the track for the Z axis. They use the same length for both an 8 and 12 inch system. I took four links out. Nice dust setup.
I noticed that Z-axis cable carrier seemed extra long. Thanks for confirming my suspicions! I didn’t know they use the same length for both the 8" and 12" gantry options.
If you’re going to remove some they are just force fitted together. Pry one side up and over the link below to remove the other side. It’s a pain to get something under the link to pry it up. There’s probably a better way.
Mounted it off a beam in between the bays, but could easily be made to mount on a wall. Just squared, levelled and plumbed the base, then used some regular door hinges to allow the gantry to swivel at the wall mount and at the head.
This was meant to be a temporary solution until I could replace most of the flex tubing with hard pipe, but you know how that goes.
Any reason a spring tool retractor wouldn’t work? Mount it to the ceiling above the center of the deck with something that hose runs through and connects to the retractor. As the hose moves away the retractor lets cable out and the hose can extend. When the hose moves to the center point the cable is pulled back and the hose is retracted.
I’m thinking of doing this for my new CNC with a larger deck. I had a boom arm on the old CNC, but that will be too small.
Sorry to revive an old thread, but I just finished copying the idea from @TapWorks .
I recently re-did my dust collection to run nice piping everywhere supported by unistrut, and decided I was tired of my old approach, which was an 8 foot section of the rockler overhead track with trolleys. While this approach did work ,what I found is that the trolleys only really moved smoothly when the spindle was centered on the table. If it moved along the Y axis with the spindle at either end of the gantry, it tended to jerk and not move until the hose was really pulling hard on it.
So Yesterday I built mounting bracket that could compensate for the 3 degree angle of the “miracle truss” structures that hold up my shop. I bolted it to the struts in between the angle iron parts that make up the struts. When I took my existing boom arms( which were originally just fixed to the wall to support the rockler track), and I screwed them together to make a nice rigid boom arm. Then I used a couple old door hinges to fasten the new boom arm to the mounting bracket.
Dust hose is currently just zipped to the underside of the boom, I’ll probably 3d printed some nicer hangers.
Works very smooth and much less slack in the hose compared to the original.
Moderator - perhaps this thread could be pinned to the top of the forum?
First picture of the original setup, followed by the new setup.
yeah, thought that maybe I’d add a mezzanine some day. Had it engineered. can’t do it without 2 more posts in the middle, cost $3000 for the footings alone. And that’s not having to get permission for extra square footage from the city. l
Finally decided that maybe I should just get rid of the junk making me want a mezanine….
and that extra height was killer when I built it…. I own three layers of scaffolding, and ended up just renting a scissor lift for a week or so to make it easier. For the roof, I got so frustrated that I just hired a local sheet metal company to come put it up for me (I had to get going on the house itself!).
But…. I can fit a full sized RV in there for storage (it is actually where we lived for the 2 years it took me to finish the house.
