January 23, 2025

Drywall Vacuum Sander

This is a Drywall Vacuum Sander that I am working on.  I plan on using this with my BAUER Cyclone Separator to be able to sand drywall with the least amount of dust possible.

The general design is taking form the screen pole sander that I have already been using.  While this works great it makes a complete mess.

The basic design consists of 5 parts. The Base, Two Clamps, and the two piece handle. I designed the handle in two pieces for ease of printing and so it can be printed without supports.

The base has holes and grooves for the drywall dust to be sucked into.

This is what it will look like once finished.

Here are all of the printed pieces ready to assemble.

I started by tapping the clamp screw holes for 8-32″ screws.

Test fit of the clamps.

For the base cushion I will be using this 3mm foam I had laying around.

I traced out all of the holes in the base and used a 1/2″ punch to cut them all out.

I liberal amount of super glue is then applied to the base.

The foam is then aligned to the base and everything weighted down until the glue dries.

Filament pins are going to be used to align the two halves for gluing.

More super glue and the two halves are ready to be joined.

Before printing the handle sides I changed my hotend and forgot to reset my Z height so one half lifted off the build plate during printing.

All is not lost though… a little super glue and baking soda is used to fill the gaps.

A little clean up and it should be good to go.

After a little sanding it’s ready to join to the base.

First I need to trim up the foam for the grooves.

Even more super glue.

Ready for testing.

I installed some screen and gave it a test and… It basically suctioned itself to the wall and was very hard to move.

To try and fix the problem I cut out the foam grooves all the way to the edges and I also drilled a few holes in the handle.  While the holes helped a lot it was still to hard to move without getting fatigued over a short period of time. Squeezing off the vacuum tube to reduce suction helped a lot so now it’s back to the drawing board.

Some design changes included extending the base grooves all the way to the side and making them a little wider.

I also added an adjustable gate valve to be able to reduce the suction.

Hopefully this will be enough.

There will be a ball and spring in the valve and in conjunction with the detents on the handle I should be able to open it a little or a lot. Before reprinting everything I am going to just cut a hole in the prototype to make sure this will fix the issue.

I also added some small tabs to all of the corners to aid in bed adhesion. These might be useful for clamping while gluing the two halves together and they should be easy enough to cut off after the fact too.

I ended up just hacking the crap out of the prototype with a Dremel to test the relief port and it seemed to do the trick… now I just need to reprint version 2 and see what happens.

Update Feb. 27th – After setting my nozzle height correctly this time and with the addition of the corner tabs the new handle body printed nice and flat.  (I did have to use a few supports for the valve port this time around though.

Here is the new Valve installed in version 2. I thought things might be hard to glue together with the Ball & Spring in place but it was easy, I just taped the valve to one half before gluing everything up and it wasn’t a problem. The valve has 6 positions but it might just end up being an open or close kind of thing but we’ll see once I get into re-testing.

The completed sander ready for more testing.

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