ShopVac Diffuser by renobot

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is a diffuser/baffle for the exhaust port on a ShopVac-style vacuum. Instead of the air blowing out in a straight stream that kicks up dust/etc, this thing will redirect the flow in all directions, and create some turbulence, so that you can hardly feel it just a few inches from the port.
The holes in the part surface add up to roughly 1.5x the area of the exhaust port, so this diffuser should not cause any back-pressure. The sound coming out of my vac does not change at all when I attach the part. I may have gone a bit overboard with all the internal flow-redirection, but it works really well!
The attached STL is actually sized to fit a Home Depot Ridgid 60-litre Vac, which has a port that is roughly 2 1/4 inches diameter. You will need to scale that up/down to fit other vacuums.
The tolerance is such that the part will not stay in on its own. Instead you wrap a strip of duct tape around the rim, and that will seal the gap and provide a tight fit (see photos).
No support is necessary. I printed at the lowest quality on a Makerbot Rep2, in about 2 hours. There is a mouse-ear around the bottom to make sure it sticks, just snap that off or use an exacto.
Designed in Autodesk Fusion 360. F3D archive is included if you want to improve the design.