Rectangle 《》round dust collector adaptor

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Looking at my tools, some have a rectangular dust collection output which obviously won't fit to your common round dust collection hose. In the past I have gotten around this with duct tape, which works really well, but is time consuming to connect disconnect between tools. I'm wondering if anyone has any suggestions for something I could make or buy?

There are plenty of adaptors for going between different radius round connections, but I haven't come across anything for round hoses.

I'm thinking of just taping/gluing a permanent round connector to the square hole.
 
Can you be a mite more specific, and if possible post up some pictures please? It seems like these are powered hand tools, such as planers and circular saws. I have a planer like that (the chip output is actually a parallelogram - it's not even square!). There are some options you might consider:

0. Check there isn't an adaptor available for the tool in question as a spare part. Power Tool Spares (S'oton) and Miles Tools (Yeovil) are places I'd start with, as they have good web sites with exploded diagrams and lists of parts.

1. If you haven't got one, get a hot-air paint stripper. They're not expensive, and useful for all sorts of things, including even bending thin wood effectively. In particular, they're good for re-shaping uPVC pipe and shrinking heatshrink.

2. uPVC pipe can be re-shaped with hot air (and a bit of practice), but if the outlet is itself plastic, consider making a male former in wood (or MDF), so you don't melt the wrong thing by accident. You can soften it with boiling water, but you can't keep it hot enough (usually, in my experience) to get a decent new shape to it. I'd pre-warm it in a simmering pan of water, and keep it at temperature with a hot air blower. If you have no fear you can also (theoretically) do it with a propane blowlamp, but I've never succeeded in not burning the outside of the pipe that way.

I'd start with a longish piece of pipe get the shape right, at the end, then cut it off to length afterwards. Cutting to length first does let you immerse the piece, but the whole lot goes plastic and you can't easily grip it to work on.

If you can't get the shape easily from one piece, consider doing parts of it by heating and then weld the bits together with solvent-weld "glue" from a builder's merchant. It really is welding (not glueing), and the joints are very strong if left for 24 hours before use. You can join most pipe material edge-to-edge without much loss of strength, and you can always reinforce the joint with strips of plastic glued over it later.

I've had great success 'unrolling' uPVC pipe by slitting it with a hacksaw (or on the bandsaw) then heating it and pressing it flat. The resulting plastic 'plate' makes good repair patches, washers, etc. If you have some unused large-ish wall tiles (and you can get permission from the Domestic Controller), heat two of them to about 90 deg C in the oven (bring them up to temp slowly so they don't crack!) Then put your flattish piece between two so it cools slowly as they do.

3. You used to be able to get giant-size heatshrink for drain and drainpipe repairs, and for going between imperial and metric sizes. It's not like the stuff for electrics, in that it's not at all flexible once shrunk. It shrinks down well and is quite thick. BUT... I haven't seen it around for a while, and it was very expensive for what it was (in 4" size).

Hope something above triggers a bright idea...

E.
 
On the subject of shaping plastics - or reshaping preformed plastics the most efficient way I've seen instead of hot water is hot engine oil - it gets that much hotter and once the part is dipped for a few seconds can be moulded like taffy, but you'll literally have only a 5-10 second window, but paired with the former shape idea you could easily push a smaller diameter tube onto a larger square (if the former is made with a cone at the start of it) and it'll stretch and set - obviously a larger tube onto a smaller square will mean some excess to deal with.
 
Thank you for the suggestions. I'll take a look in my local big box store to see if any kind of UPVC thing could be a good match or something I could adapt.

Eric The Viking":337c59gu said:
Can you be a mite more specific, and if possible post up some pictures please?

Hmm, I'm away from the shop now for a week or so. Here the belt sander I have http://www.wickes.co.uk/Wickes-800W-Bel ... V/p/141165

You can see the rectangular output when you hover over the images
 
I see what you mean :-(

Should be do-able with plastic pipe, but to be honest you might do better with rubber hose of the right size pushed over, and coupled to vacuum hose at the other side - it would be fairly hard to get re-shaped plastic airtight enough, as it looks like there is a lumpy seam where the two halves of the casing join.

I have a Makita, and one of the big advantages is that you can cable-tie the hose to the back of the handle, as it gets a lot of flexing in use. It has a round spigot, but doesn't come with a hose adaptor. I use a bit of i5mm foamed pipe insulation as female:female and the narrow hose from my Parkside vacuum. It works a treat.

In your case you might do it with an offcut of 22mm or 28mm insulation (won't break anything for sure), but I'd guess you'\ll really have to contrive some sort of hose suport/clamp from the back of the handle or casing, so the coupler doesn't keep coming off or, worse, snaps the plastics of the sander.

Also consider using flexible electrical conduit for the first couple of metres from the sander: you can get it in narrower sizes than vacuum hose and it won't put the same stress on the joint.
 
I was going to suggest that this would be an ideal thing to make on a 3d printer and assumes that lots of people would have done this. A search on thingiverse however didn't turn up a lot, there was a dewalt sander adaptor but not much else under the search terms I used. If you happen to have the sander then you could get the files from thingiverse and send it to a printing service, or ask a friend to print it.
You may find the manufacturers will supply square to round adaptors, probably for silly prices but worth checking.
You could also try using low temperature theroplastic, the stuff that becomes workable in hot water. Polymorph is one brand, in conjunction with off the shelf pipes I would think.
 
I suggest that you just cut some slots in the end of some round pipe so that the end of the square pipe can push into it.
I've got something similar on a Bosch electric planer where the outlet is a plastic rectangle. I use an old vacuum cleaner hose, and in my case there are already slots at the end of the original vac hose connector (so it can squeeze into a hole and spring back tight.) The slots are just a nice tight fit over the rectangular tube.

I find that the extra air inlets around the edge of the round tube don't matter at all in use, but you could always fill them with mastic or duct tape over them.
 
This is almost certainly too late for the OP, but for others who have a similar problem, reducing the size of round connectors is described elsewhere on the forum. Once the correct round size is reached, then you can get to rectangular by using a heatgun and a piece of wood made the same size as the outlet, and pushed into the heated pipe. A bit of persuasion will get it to a fairly good fit, then some rubber sheet glued to the inside will hopefully give a reasonable grip.
 
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