Necessary Improvements To My Small Dust Collector

I own a small dust collector in my shop.  Specifically, the Grizzly G0710.  It's not the best, but it works for the most part.  I originally bought it not knowing what type of machines I was going to pair it up with.  Now that I have some bigger tools in the shop, my small and humble dust collector has become a major bottle neck during my fabrication process.

Most of the time when I'm cutting down hardwood, I don't experienced much issues.  But if I feed my cuts too fast, then the amount of debris from the machines I'm using would overwhelm the dust collector and the inlet hose starts backing up which causes the dust collector hose to clog up.

With softwood, I see this more often than not especially when I'm using my jointer.  Softwood tends to cut off in bigger chunks.  I've been working on Cedar recently and I had to clean out the hose every other cut which slows me down quite a bit.

So this is what I did to fix the issue.  I cut out the blade guard.  I'm not suggesting anyone else do this and yes, this does void the warranty.  By doing this, this fixes my issue with clogged hoses and also increases the CFM flow rate by quite a bit.

How to do this

I have both an angle cutter and a dremel.  For this, I used a dremel.  Attach the disk for metal cutting.  It should take about 2 mins to do all 4 connector points.  Also, I highly recommend you avoid using the dremel bits with the EZ-Lock attachments.  It's a really bad product because the bit breaks off the EZ-Lock connector piece which makes it not so easy to remove from the shaft.  I've had two break on me on first use.

Before

After