6" dust hood for Grizzly planer

[Joe Shinall]

Has anyone converted their Grizzly or any other industrial planer to 6" piping and have any advice on how or pictures? The picture below is how it looks now (not mine, but same concept). Trying not to reduce from 6 inch PVC down to the 4 inch fitting but not really sure a good way to make this work. The pipe will be coming down from the ceiling and will have about 3 or 4 feet of flex pipe because I have to move it around sometimes a couple of feet.

Harley065.jpg

[Jim Andrew]

The Grizzly 15" planer does not need a 6"changeover. It is so well designed for dust collection, that 4" works fine, as long as you have removed the strip of foam from under the hood. I can leave the planer gate open as well as the jointer gate open, and the dc still gets all the chips. I did go to 6" on my sanders, and add a 4" to the bandsaw so there are 2- 4" on my mm16. Also changed my unisaw to 6" under the table, now it keeps the cabinet empty of sawdust.

[Igor Vasilenko]

Hi Joe, I've never really seen an industrial planer with anything less than a 6" dia. pipe dust hood. Then your post made me double check some of the new stuff that's available, and I was shocked to find the bigger Grizzly planers have 5" dia. ports!!! Before I sold it, I had a little 1980's 15" "four-post" planer (like the Grizzly in your attached photo) that had a 6" port from the factory. I recall it was a Taiwanese machine.
Here are links to the bigger Grizzly models:

http://www.grizzly.com/products/25-E...ce=grizzly.com (5" port)

http://www.grizzly.com/products/24-E...ce=grizzly.com (5" port)

And they call them "extreme series"!

I guess in your situation you should have acceptable results if you buy a short-taper 6" to 5" and then to 4" reducer. Unless you are taking full-depth, full-with cuts on your machine (may not be possible with your motor size) I think that'll do you just fine.

One of my 24" planers has a 7" port, the other a 6". DC capabilities are great on those machines, and they are designed to take up a 1/2" off per pass off of a slab.

[James Gunning]

Hood-for-Dewalt 734-12.5-inch-planer.jpg

This is how I adapted my Dewalt 734. Sorry I don't have a photo of it mounted. In use, this one has the 6" hole sticking straight up.

This is a register boot from the big box store. It has a 90 degree bend in it which is just what I needed for my application, but they also have straight ones that look similar to the Grizzly factory hood. To fit the Dewalt I soldered up the seams to stiffen the boot. Also put in two pads drilled and tapped to match the placement of the thumbscrews that held the factory hood in place. Bent the metal on the rectangular part to fit. Works perfectly with much higher airflow and zero chips escaping.

[Lon Crosby]

Did a conversion for that planer. The shop is too far awayon a cold night for pixs. A 6 inch steel pipe 12” long. One end was gently squisheddown until it was oval shape and would just fit over the 4’ pipe opening on theOEM outlet. Started cutting away metal from the end of the 6” pipe until I hada tight fit with the unmodified OEM part. Removed the excess metal from the squished end used a metal cut off blade in an angle grinder for the initial cuts and a belt grinderfor final shaping. Scribed around the fitting to define the cut-off line on theOEM outlet. Cut the OEM fitting off just short of the scribe line so there wasan overlap joint to weld. In the old days, I would have done a pretty buttjoint. Tacked the two pieces together in multiple places and then welded thejoint in sections. Used some Bondo putty and paint to make it look pretty.Actually, I tacked it together before welding to test it and ended up anglingthe pipe upwards a bit to make it easier to retrieve short boards from theoutfeed table. Not a difficult modification.

[Larry Frank]

I have the Jet version of this planer with the 4" port. I find that it does an excellent job and almost no chips or dust escapes. I measured with my system and have about 600 cfm when attached to the planer.

I know there are people who think all dust ports should be 6". However, if the 4" port is pulling adequate cfm and collecting the dust and chips, why change to 6"?

[Joe Shinall]

I do have chips fly out of my planer and end up on the floor or stuck in crevices near the bed, which is why I was wanting to go 6. Since I'm running 6 throughout the shop, I'm trying to get 6 on everything I can. I'll try it with 6 reduced to 5 then 4 and see if the increase in 6 main line will do a better job in general than just the 4" flex pipe did I had before and go from there.