Boom or bust?

[Martin Roper]

This is my first attempt at a boom. I'm not entirely happy with it, so I'll consider it a prototype. I have about $40 in it including hinges and lights.

Each arm is a lamination of a piece of soft pine and 2 sheets of 1/4" plywood. The pine was very light so the holes saved barely any weight.

All clamped up

I mortised the inner arm into a piece of 1.75" hard maple and shaped it to clear the hinges

The hinge system should theoretically give a 180° swing

I mounted 24" LED lights to the bottom of it and ran the vac hose over the top

The two pieces are hinged in the middle with an extended length of 5'. For work at the workbench I can run the hose through just the inner arm. Eventually there will be a vise at the end of the workbench and the vac hose can be run through the fully-extended arm to do any work down there.

Lessons learned:

• I have to get up on a step ladder to feed the hose through the tubes which defeats some of the convenience the boom is supposed to provide. Next time I'll run it under the arm.
• The laminated arm assembly was unnecessarily complex to make, particularly the tail piece. Boom 2.0 will simply be 1/2' birch plywood with strips of maple on the top and bottom to create an I-beam. It should be lighter and just as strong.
• Putting the lights on the boom seemed like a good idea at the time, but I think I'll just mount them on the ceiling.

The only bits I can't salvage are the arms themselves, so 2.0 shouldn't be too difficult.

 

[smallboat]

Thanks for posting this. I’ve been ruminating on a similar setup to get dust collection over the top of my TS. It hadn’t occured to me tha tI could swing it to get the DP and BS as well.

Thanks for the increased motivation and the construction tips

 

[LeftyTom]

Functional wins the day.

 

[Dee2]

Where, please, did you source the hinges?

 

[Martin Roper]

Where, please, did you source the hinges?

I found them on Amazon, but I would not recommend them for this application. The post on the hinge is too close to the mounting surface which required that I take too much material off the boom. This is as thin as I was willing to go.

It prevents the boom from extending a full 180°.

Gate hinge

Flange bearing

Also, I found that the hinge OD was .63" and the bearing ID was .625". I had to ream out the bearing by 5 thou to get it to fit. It was a PITB.

On the next one I'll just use a door hinge.

 

[tvrgeek]

When I made a boom years ago, I uses a turnbuckle as the top of the arm and the lower bit was just in compression. Of course, the wider the spacing on the bearings, the less slop. You can get door hinges with ball bearings for a bit of over-kill.

GASP, you still have a cloth bag dust power atomizer! Please convert to HEPA filtering. I lost two friends to lung disease.