DC Hose Lift for the Drum Sander

While drum sanding a project yesterday, my pet peeve about drum sanders reared its head: that the dust port is on top of the door.  There's no good place to put the hose.  You put it over the carriage housing and it'll fall off changing the height knob or fall the other way and pop open the door to the drum, which sends dust in hundreds of directions (all towards your face).

I recently added a number of circuits to my garage shop specifically because I rarely used my drum sander... it needed to be plugged in the family room via extension to use the DC unit with it.  Now I needed to address the lack of decent DC connection.

The solution is woefully easy: a stick with a 1/4" groove in the edge to grab onto the carriage housing and the bottom end cut like a half-lap so I could fit a bolt into the drum sander's base.  On top, a spring-clamp-like holder for the hose.

Note that the top of my Performax 16-32, I put a Dust Right compatible connector.  The new hose I added also has a Dust Right handle since it will be handy for the floor cleaning attachment as well.

As you can see, I have a Ridgid 12" lunchbox planer installed into the Performax stand (if you want to do this, realize that you have to take the stand apart and build it around the planer... not fun, but a space-saver!).  I ran a hose up to the stick and mounted it with a similar spring clamp.  Now I can just move the hose connector over when I used the planer.  While this isn't ideal having to lift chips so far, I've found in the past it wasn't an issue.  If it is after this modification, I can simply disconnect the planer hose and lay it on the floor with the DC connected and use the spring clip as a convenient stow.

Now, my drum sander is very convenient to use; it'll touch every project here on out.