Modification for Ridgid R4510 jobsite saw

I have owned this small jobsite saw for a while and even posted a review of it on this site a while back that included the installation of an outfeed extension on the backside of the saw to make it easier to deal with long-board ripping jobs. I also posted a description of how I made a zero clearance throat plate for the tool.

Anyway, those of you who own this saw and use it regularly may notice that the plastic fitting for dust collection is a tad flimsy. It is held to the cast aluminum, interior blade shield underneath by a single screw inserted through a hole in the dust exit of the blade guard and threaded to the plastic exit port. The fitting easily wobbles with even a slight amount of pressure from any external connection to a dust extractor.

I have never had a failure with this, but I still do not like the visibly flimsy behavior of the exit vent when hooked up to my dust blower. (I work on a deck adjacent to my shop much of the time and blow dust into my natural wooded yard or onto a tarp if the dust production looks to be major.) My much lower cost Ryobi BTS-20 jobsite saw also has a dust port, and it is considerably more rigid than the one on the Ridgid (pun intended).

So, I did a modification today. I removed the pop-off plastic shield cover over the aluminum shield, removed the screw, removed the plastic vent tube, and drilled through the tube housing and also through the plastic cover. I then re-installed the plastic vent tube, ran a screw up through the bottom (see photo number 4), reinstalled the plastic housing cover (see photo 3), and secured the result with a large washer and wing nut (see photos 2, and 1). This stabilized the plastic exit port and made me feel a lot better about the job of dust extracting. True, the screw now sits in the dust-exit stream, but, hey, it also acts like a barrier to keep large pieces out of the dust-collector fan and actually blocks very little of the wind flow.

If I need to remove the pop-off plastic cover I first remove the wing nut and washer and then remove the cover to clean out the blade area.

Howard Ferstler