Quote Originally Posted by cropwell View Post
using a vacuum cleaner to remove chips...
My view is against any shrouding round the cutter as I like to see what's going on.
Unfortunately those two statements don't really belong together. The flow rate from a standard household vacuum cleaner is very low compared to even a small proper dust extractor - roughly 10 times less. I tried a couple of vacuum cleaners and they were completely useless as the tool threw the the chips out at such a high speed that the vacuum could not catch them. The only way to get it to work was to add a shroud to intercept the chips, giving them time to be caught. Still it's not a good solution, so I got one of these, which was cheaper at the time:

http://compare.ebay.co.uk/like/18042...bar&adtype=pla

I was intending to make a cyclone for it, but since I almost exclusively cut aluminium it only really gets used when I surface the MDF bed it's hardly worth it. I leave it to surface the bed on it's own as I don't trust it to filter the fine MDF dust properly.