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Ouch! Fingerprints are a thing of the past! I will definitely be mindful of that risk. I have one of those erasers, and I have some plexiglass scraps around here somewhere. Good to know. It's funny about the sandpaper; opinions vary about the best grit for general thickness sanding. I'm used to 80 grit, and I have some for this machine, so I'll try that for awhile and see how it goes.

I really appreciate all the input on this new addition to my shop.

Well, I had a productive evening last night and a bit of the morning today putting together a new dust hood for my Shop Pro 25. Here are a few shots of the outside:





And here are some shots of the inside:





The point of all this is to use 6" piping all the way to the dust collector, in my case, a ClearVue. I decided to go with one 6" port instead of two 4" ports because the single 6" actually covers a larger area than two 4" ports. Plus, since I needed to be able to roll this thing to and from the wall, a single 6" flex hose was going to be easier to manage.

Construction was easy. All construction grade 1/2" plywood, screwed together using a Kreg pocket hole jig. For simple projects like this, the Kreg makes it go pretty fast. The top of the hood has a 6" hole I cut with a jigsaw, and then I epoxied a short stem of 6" thin wall PVC into the hole. I thought about getting fancy with the inside corners (rounding them over, putting in wedges, etc.), but when you take a look at larger drum sanders, the insides are all squared off sheet metal, so I figured this simple box would work fine. I did install two baffles (shown in the last two photos) that help make the suction zone smaller. They sit down on part of the frame and create a nice, smaller box from which the air is drawn. I could have just made the lid smaller, and put the outside walls where the baffles are, but that would have exposed the drive belt for the drum during operation, and that's a no-no. It was safer to build the lid the size it is and install the baffles.

Anyway, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. I have run some test boards through the sander, and the dust collector captures everything. This was time well spent.