In today’s “printing meets programming meets woodworking” news, I’ve printed an adapter that allows me to hook up my Shop-Vac hose (1 1/4″ diameter) to my planer’s dust port (4″ diameter). The adapter was designed in OpenSCAD using a module I wrote that can create adapters between two hoses of any size.

This print was also my first time using a cold acetone vapor bath to smooth out an ABS print. A vapor bath melts the edges and ridges in the print, smoothing out the whole thing. Here’s how the adapter looked after three hours soaking in vapor:

Whoops! Three hours was too long… although it is very smooth and shiny. I printed another adapter, but this time, I cut the layer height in half, to 0.1mm. This resulted in a much smoother surface that didn’t need acetone smoothing, but it took twice as long to print.

The largest available Shop-Vac adapter on Amazon is 2 1/2″ across and retails for $8.37, so this 4″ adapter can be reasonably appraised at $10. Money in my pocket, and it sure beats the duct tape I was previously using to connect the two machines.

The OpenSCAD script and STL file are available on GitHub.