This is the result of quite a bit of tinkering. I finally finished messing with one of my Bosch planers to the point where I thought I’d put up a photo. Well, the depth adjustment will get a more comfortable ‘stick’ at some point…but the 2" vertical dust vac outlet, the 25’ cord, the new handle angle, and the filled-with-epoxy shoe grooves are done.
I owe the inspiration for this to a lot of guys who’ve gone before me. I’d collected quite a few photos of things like this & tried to put several bits together to make what would work best for me.
I’ll put up my inspirational photos as well, to credit those who showed the way.
Looks good! What are you and Rick using for the hose connections? I’ve got the hose coming out the top of my Skil but would like to do the same for the Hitachis.
I don’t know what Rick used. I found a 2" port with a square flange & 4 screw holes in the Shop-vac section of my local Home Depot. I cut off one side of the flange. I epoxied a piece of plywood to the top of the planer and set screws through the remaining 2 holes into that. The front has a little air gap which is good because if you don’t let some air in, your hose can constrict itself & try to shorten when you aren’t running the planer.
I didn’t understand your sentence about the depth adjustment. Did you loosen it up so you can easily adjust the depth on the fly? I’d be interested in knowing how you did it ,if you did.
Get one of those 2" square dust collector ports. Heat it up good and hot with a heat gun. When the plastic gets hot enough to bend press it down on top of your planer and it will conform to the shape of the planer. Check out rickholts earlier posts. He has good internal pictures.
Doug, one of the reasons I like that Bosch is that it goes through the whole depth adjustment range in 90* of turning. 0 to 5/32" (most only go to 4/32" or 1/8"). But gripping & ripping with the small round knob isn’t that comfortable, nor can you tell just by look/feel how open your planer is.
So I just popped off the top of the cap & drilled through it & shoved in a piece of dowel. The nice thing about that is you can put the doweled cap back on at any angle you like, it fits on 6 different ways, so you can experiment with the dowel angle until it works for your hand. I wanted to leave it simple until I really knew what my hand wanted to feel and then I’ll put on a larger, more comfortable knob handle of some kind.
The clicks are pretty smooth & minimal as is, although I still might try to figure out how to get rid of them altogether at some point.
For a $90 planer, its not much to risk & its pretty easy to open up. I used it for about a year & a half first, mainly listening to the bearings, until I believed the quality was good enough to merit the mods. Hate to spend the time fixing up a planer that’s only going to last a couple boards anyway. I’ve had pretty good luck with other Bosch tools (including a slightly larger planer I kept intact for woodworking) so I think its worth the trouble.
