I’ll admit it: I’m a tool junkie. When I stumbled across Byrnes Model Machines I knew I had to up my workshop game.
Byrnes makes small precision tools for hobbyists. I picked up a 12″ table saw and a 4″ variable speed sander – plus some accessories for each. These are high quality tools so they’re not cheap – but they perform beautifully and service was excellent.
One issue that arose was mating the dust ports on these tools to my Festool dust extractor: The Byrnes machines are built to imperial measurements with 1.5″ ports, while Festool uses metric and has 27mm hoses.
In discussing this with my friend Chris Abbott, I learned that dust collection is a wild west of competing systems. Many companies seem to develop proprietary connections that only work with their own tools to encourage customers to shop within a single brand. (e.g.: If you’re buying Company A’s track saw, it only connects to Company A’s dust collector – but you can also buy Company A’s sander, jigsaw, table saw, router, etc….)
That kinda sucks when adding specialist tools like these to a workshop. However, I am not complaining. I mention it here because I found a solution:
A trip to my local Lee Valley Tools turned up the Mirka Deco Sander Adapter. The flexible rubber cuts easily with a knife and because it’s a true cone – not a stacked set of stepped rings – it nicely does the job of bridging imperial and metric.
The Model Railway Show 