Now my Excalibur sucks

[Larry Palanuk]

I was really excited when I finally got my Excalibur overarm installed and hooked up to my dust collection system. I was let down when I saw dust blowing out all around the hood and figured I must have set my expectations too high.

I have lived with it over a year now, but then today for some reason, I decided to investigate. I had lots of vacuum going in; not much at the hood. So I took off the hose and shined a flashlight down it's throat and notice a restiction in the design. A plate with a 1 3/8" hole in it.

After I drilled out the plate with hole saw to the full 3" pipe size, I have a hood that sucks out all the dust - its awesome.

I just can't figure out why they have the restrictor in there. It is certainly not structural.

[David DeCristoforo]

I can hear it all the way over here. What were they thinking?!?!

[Bill Arnold]

Did the engineer have a senior moment???

[Doug Mason]

I was never satisfied with my excaliber; I got rid of it and built an overhead version from scraps--and to this date it works great. Of course if you have to move the saw frequently, it's a different story.

[Rod Sheridan]

Beats me why the plate is in there, I have the older straight arm version and it's just a piece of telescoping pipe, no restrictor.......Rod.

[frank shic]

larry, you should seriously put that piece of advice on amazon.com so that everyone who buys one will know how to increase the suckage lol

[Mike Cutler]

That's really wierd
It seems as if a step was bypassed in the manufacturing process.

[Phil Thien]

That's really wierd
It seems as if a step was bypassed in the manufacturing process.

Yeah, or maybe that piece if laser cut and somewhere along the line a drawing was misread or something when they were preparing the code to run the laser cutter.

[Ken Fitzgerald]

I wonder if it might have been designed for use with something smaller than a DC where you might not have as large a volume of air moving....say a shop vac. Of course, most folks who have a hood on their table saw, have a dc system too.

Often when something is engineered they trade off a little at each end so that it will work under a wider spectrum of circumstances......

In other words, you might make one specifically for use with DC...another specifically for use with a shop vac.....or design one with less than optimum performance with either DC or shop vac but with "fair" performance with either?

[Larry Palanuk]

Yeah, or maybe that piece if laser cut and somewhere along the line a drawing was misread or something when they were preparing the code to run the laser cutter.

I would be curious to hear if anyone else with this model has seen this. Maybe I did get a "mistake".

All that you need to do is unscrew the hose clamp and shine a flashlight down the hole - it will be obvious.

[Bryan Cowing]

I pulled mine apart and it doesn't have a small hole, looks like yours after the repair. Maybe someone missed a step in the manufacturing process.

[Clay Crocker]

I pulled mine apart too; looks like your modified version. Yours must have been a manufacturing error.

Clay

[Larry Palanuk]

I pulled mine apart too; looks like your modified version. Yours must have been a manufacturing error.

Clay

I guess I am just "lucky".

[Chip Lindley]

Larry, I believe you must have been provided one of the newer *GREEN* Excalibur guards which were designed to *conserve AIR*! Pfftttt!