I just received the KentCNC the Split Shoe Mini and so far it is not what I expected it to be. I have the X Carve 1000 and the dust shoe they sent had a 2 1/2” hole for the shop vac hose which I don’t understand why if the hole on the x carve dust shoe is 1 7/8”. Not a big deal except for the fact that I had to buy a reducer as I will show in a pic. Once that issue was resolved I noticed there was another big issue, when I slipped the dust shoe on the spindle of the router the dust shoe totally covered the locking button and the router is pushed down as far as I can get it to go without either filing away a portion of the plastic on the router. I feel as even though I would file away the plastic to make the router go down a little further it’s still would not be enough room as the acrylic dust shoe is very thick. I’ve called KentCNC and they are baffled as they claim they have sold a ton of these for my machine with no complaints. If anyone has any suggestions please let me know as I do not wish to return it but at this point it is totally useless to me. I would have to remove the dust shoe every time to do a bit change which is absolutely pointless, the purpose of having this dust shoe is to change bits without removing it. Any and all help is greatly appreciated, thank you all very much.
Update:
I was able to dremel away a bit of the plastic on the Dewalt router and was able to push the router far enough down so the locking button cleared the plexiglass on the dust shoe, the rubber reducer adapter also worked fine for getting the 1 7/8” shop vac hose to connect to the dust shoe so all in all it was a bit frustrating to not have something work right out of the box but it’s possible X Carve may have updated the design on the dust shoe?
I have 2 machines an xcarve 1000 and an openbuilds lead1515, the open builds came with a similar dust shoe as the kent, I don’t like that sometimes its not touching the cutting surface allowing dust to escape. But I like the fact that a 2 1/2 inch hose fits right up, I redesigned my x carve dust shoe to use a 2 1/2 inch hose and carved it out of .339 inch acrylic, ordered a new brush from inventables. Now I can set it to the material and it stays there collecting dust as it should. I have done away with the shop vac and am using a 1hp harbor freight dustcollector going into a bucktool cyclone with 4 inch ports reduced with a 2 1/2 ihch y. running both machines at once I have a lot less dust on the waste board