Making a Dewalt Sander work with a Bosch (or Festool) dust hose

Making a Dewalt Sander work with a Bosch (or Festool) dust hose

Dewalt sander dust port before modification

My Dewalt random orbit sander serves me pretty well, but I’ve never really had a lot of luck connecting dust hoses to it.  Until now, I always had a hard time finding one that fit snugly enough to stay on and didn’t get in the way while trying to use the sander.  I recently discovered this Bosch 35mm VAC005 5-Meter Vacuum Hose at Amazon.  It’s a perfect fit for my Festool tools and it works with my existing standard shop vac as well as an adapter that I got for my 4″ dust collection pipes.  It also fits other tools like my mitre saw very well.  I was able to get it to fit over the smallest tube of the Dewalt fitting, but it kept slipping off.  Looking closer at the Dewalt fitting, I realized that the Bosch hose end would fit inside the mid-sized tube on the Dewalt fitting.

The drill press set up to remove the inner most tube on the Dewalt sander dust fitting

To get it to fit, I was going to need to cut out the inner most tube deep inside the fitting so that the rubber hose end would be able to go in far enough to stay connected.  I thought about a few different ways of doing this before concluding that I could use a Dremel 199 High Speed Cutter mounted in my drill press as a saw.  This isn’t really the intended use for a drill press or for this cutter, but it worked well.  From the smell of it while it was cutting, the Dewalt dust fitting is probably ABS plastic.  I set the drill press to around 500 RPM and I lowered and locked the drill press quill at the proper height so that the fitting was flat on the table as I was cutting.  I manipulated the dust fitting by hand, keeping it moving and taking many shallow passes so that heat didn’t build up too much on the bit and I didn’t put too much sideways pressure on the drill press – the bearings aren’t designed for sideways force, and if your chuck’s taper isn’t seated well, it can come loose so be very careful if you do this.

Dewalt sander dust fitting with the smallest tube removed

Even though I was being careful, the cutter did get a little too warm and melted the plastic, so I had to stop and clean its teeth.  It might be a good idea to stop half way through to let it all cool off a bit to avoid melting.  Breathing the fumes from melting plastic is a bad idea, so I did this right beside my open garage door to avoid them.

I set the depth so that I got almost right down to the bottom of the fitting, but I was careful not to weaken the base of the medium size tube.  If that becomes too thin, it might break off in use, and there are some corners of the fitting that are close to the bottom of the tube where you could puncture the dust fitting and dust could escape in use.

This modification works perfectly, and now my dust hose works with one more tool.  Almost all of my hand held tools now connect through this same Bosch VAC005 hose and I’m really pleased with how flexible it is and how well the rubber fitting connects to my tools.  I have it set up to the right of my work bench and connected to my shop dust collector and it seems to be working well enough with the tools I’ve connected to it.  I wouldn’t want to run my shop vac for a long sanding session because it gets a bit warm and its suction is a bit too much for sanding, but the big dust collector is pretty choked up because of the tiny opening inside the Dewalt sander’s dust fitting, so I normally open a nearby blast gate part way to ensure that the cyclone isn’t too constricted to separate the dust out of the air.  Opening a second blast gate also lets me regulate the suction a little bit at the tool.

Dewalt random orbit sander with Bosch dust hose connected