Finishing the PVC tubes reinforcing the vacuum cleaner adapters required fixtures on each end:
Because the tubes get epoxied into the adapters, there’s no particular need for a smooth surface finish and, in fact, some surface roughness makes for a good epoxy bond. The interior of a 3D printed adapter is nothing if not rough; the epoxy in between will be perfectly happy.
Turning the tubes started by just grabbing the conduit in the chuck and peeling the end that stuck out down to the finished diameter, because the conduit was thick-walled enough to let that work.
The remaining wall was so thin that the chuck would crunch it into a three-lobed shape, so the white ring in the chuck is a scrap of PVC pipe turned to fit the tube ID and provide enough reinforcement to keep the tube round.
The conduit ID isn’t a controlled dimension and was, in point of fact, not particularly round. It was, however, smooth, which counts for more than anything inside a tube carrying airborne fuzzy debris; polishing the interior of a lathe-bored pipe simply wasn’t going to happen.
The fixture on the other end started as a scrap of polycarbonate bandsawed into a disk with a hole center-drilled in the middle:
Stick it onto a disk turning fixture and sissy-cut the OD down a little smaller than the eventual tube OD:
Turn the end down to fit the tube ID, flip it around to center-drill the other side, stick it into the tube, and finally finish the job:
The nice layering effect along the tube probably comes from molding the conduit from recycled PVC with no particular concern for color matching.
A family portrait of the fixtures with a finished adapter:
A fine chunk of Quality Shop Time: solid modeling, 3D printing, mini-lathe turning, and even some coordinate drilling on the Sherline.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 