Now the fun part. Mounting to the vac. I decided to utilize the long, coarse threaded screws/studs that Festool uses to attach the hose garage to the top of the vac. The benefit: I could retain use of the hose garage, unlike Festool’s own Workcenter which essentially covers up this space, rendering it pretty useless. The downside: I wasn’t sure how strong these studs would be as a mounting foundation, as they are only biting into plastic inside the vac body. But one more potential benefit: three of these mounting locations are outside of the Systainer footprint. Meaning, if the assembly is strong enough on three legs, I could actually keep a Systainer mounted underneath. We’ll just have to see. (Ends up it's plenty strong with just three mounting points, so keeping a systainer down below is totally possible!)
I don’t want to even think about how expensive these custom, torx-headed, extra-long screws would be to replace through Festool’s parts department. I can hear their answer now: “You’ll have to buy a new hose garage and we’ll throw them in at no additional cost.”
I need to weld smooth rod standoffs on top of the torx screws, but first, let’s get rid of that zinc coating with an overnight soak in vinegar. A really handy trick since grinding zinc dust is absolutely atrocious for your health.
Intermission. Time for some staining. I had some old Arm-R-Seal needing to be used, so I threw a few coats on. If I could do it all over again, I would have sprayed High Performance instead, since the real challenge here is getting into all the nooks and crannies.
Back to the mounting studs. Here’s what I’m trying to combine:
Sophisticated welding fixture:
Tack welded, then fully welded, then cleaned up on a 3M 220 grit Scotch-Brite radial bristle brush (a spectacular metal finishing wheel).
Paint time. I found some old General Finishes milk paint in RAL 6018 (Festool green) from a, well, failed previous project. Sprayed a few coats and then finished it with High Performance. Blurring out the highly ineffective spray can “clean metal” primer (no free advertising for them). This step ended up taking a bunch of time and totally wasn't worth it.
Made a mistake here – I still needed to thread the top ends of these rods, and figured spraying them first would be best as I could then cut nice, clean threads into them. Problem is, I only have a manual tap and it takes a tremendous amount of rotational force to cut 3/8-16 threads into a solid rod. The only way to secure them for threading was in a big knurled vice, which completely trashed the finish. My tip: don’t finish the hardware. It looks cool but is not worth the time.
