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Shop-built drum sander ideal for home workshop
By Steve Maxwell
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Sometimes the simplest home workshop tools really are the most effective ones, and I know for sure that this fact extends to the realm of power sanding. What else can you say about a homely, shop-built machine that outperforms manufactured sanders costing many times more? And what if this device delivered on all its promises while also operating dustlessly, without the need to be connected to any kind of vacuum system?
All this sounds too good to be true, but the situation is reality. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have believed it myself had I not seen a man named Paul Moore making it work. He’s an innovative guy who owns a Canadian woodworking supply outlet called Stockroom Supply (www.stockroomsupply.com; 877-287-5017), and he’s successfully harnessed a concept that I call “light-pressure sanding”. It’s at the heart of a revolution in build-it-yourself sanding machines for the home workshop, and you don’t even need to buy the hardware that Paul offers in order to make your own version. Regardless of where you get parts, the sanding results are inexpensive, quiet, dustless and extremely good.
Here’s the proposition in a nutshell: Start with a long, thin, cylindrical drum that’s suspended on bearings at both ends, connected to a 1/4 hp or 1/2 hp motor by a rubber V-belt. A drum measuring two or three inches in diameter is best. Make it as long as necessary for sanding the widths of wood you typically encounter in your shop.
Next, encase the drum in a plywood box, with a slot cut into the hinged top to expose part of the drum. Also, build the top so it pivots for height adjustment. This is critical. The top must be ever-so-slightly lower than the top edge of the drum in order for the light-pressure system to work. You don’t want anything more than the abrasive particles themselves to rise up higher than the table. Any lower and the spinning drum won’t even contact the wood; a smidgeon higher and all you get is clogged, burned sandpaper. Precise drum height adjustment is the hidden genius behind this system, and that’s why you need to make height tweaking easy. A couple of woodscrews underneath the lip of the box top makes it a breeze to adjust table height for optimum results. And once you have the system set, you can leave it alone.
During use, simply slide the face or edge of your wood over the spinning drum in several passes to smooth it. That’s it. Since the contact area between the drum and the wood is under such light pressure, abrasives last a long, long time without clogging, even when sanding resinous wood like pine. The results are amazing. Light pressure is also why virtually no sawdust gets kicked up into the air when using the sander. Instead, the wood fibres created by the spinning drum are relatively large, allowing them to drop to the bottom of the box surrounding the spinning shaft.
The light-pressure sanding system can be used with different grades of abrasives, and switching over from one to the other is easy. The best approach uses Velcro-backed sandpaper that comes in strips you can wind on and off of the drum in a couple of seconds. You’ll find 80-grit and 120-grit abrasives the most useful.
Sanding is one of those workshop trials that I put up with because the results can’t be matched by any other smoothing method. Sure, you can scrape or plane small wood surfaces without noise or significant dust, but when you have anything larger than a cutting board to build, it’s pretty tempting to reach for a power sander of some sort. The light-pressure sanding system tames the bad habits of the sanding process, while producing excellent results in very little time.
And best of all, it does this at low-cost in a build-it-yourself format. And if there’s one thing I know for sure about home handypeople, it’s that they love to save a little money doing things for themselves.
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Shop-built drum sander ideal for home workshop
By Steve Maxwell
|
|
|
Sometimes the simplest home workshop tools really are the most effective ones, and I know for sure that this fact extends to the realm of power sanding. What else can you say about a homely, shop-built machine that outperforms manufactured sanders costing many times more? And what if this device delivered on all its promises while also operating dustlessly, without the need to be connected to any kind of vacuum system?
All this sounds too good to be true, but the situation is reality. And to be honest, I wouldn’t have believed it myself had I not seen a man named Paul Moore making it work. He’s an innovative guy who owns a Canadian woodworking supply outlet called Stockroom Supply (www.stockroomsupply.com; 877-287-5017), and he’s successfully harnessed a concept that I call “light-pressure sanding”. It’s at the heart of a revolution in build-it-yourself sanding machines for the home workshop, and you don’t even need to buy the hardware that Paul offers in order to make your own version. Regardless of where you get parts, the sanding results are inexpensive, quiet, dustless and extremely good.
Here’s the proposition in a nutshell: Start with a long, thin, cylindrical drum that’s suspended on bearings at both ends, connected to a 1/4 hp or 1/2 hp motor by a rubber V-belt. A drum measuring two or three inches in diameter is best. Make it as long as necessary for sanding the widths of wood you typically encounter in your shop.
Next, encase the drum in a plywood box, with a slot cut into the hinged top to expose part of the drum. Also, build the top so it pivots for height adjustment. This is critical. The top must be ever-so-slightly lower than the top edge of the drum in order for the light-pressure system to work. You don’t want anything more than the abrasive particles themselves to rise up higher than the table. Any lower and the spinning drum won’t even contact the wood; a smidgeon higher and all you get is clogged, burned sandpaper. Precise drum height adjustment is the hidden genius behind this system, and that’s why you need to make height tweaking easy. A couple of woodscrews underneath the lip of the box top makes it a breeze to adjust table height for optimum results. And once you have the system set, you can leave it alone.
During use, simply slide the face or edge of your wood over the spinning drum in several passes to smooth it. That’s it. Since the contact area between the drum and the wood is under such light pressure, abrasives last a long, long time without clogging, even when sanding resinous wood like pine. The results are amazing. Light pressure is also why virtually no sawdust gets kicked up into the air when using the sander. Instead, the wood fibres created by the spinning drum are relatively large, allowing them to drop to the bottom of the box surrounding the spinning shaft.
The light-pressure sanding system can be used with different grades of abrasives, and switching over from one to the other is easy. The best approach uses Velcro-backed sandpaper that comes in strips you can wind on and off of the drum in a couple of seconds. You’ll find 80-grit and 120-grit abrasives the most useful.
Sanding is one of those workshop trials that I put up with because the results can’t be matched by any other smoothing method. Sure, you can scrape or plane small wood surfaces without noise or significant dust, but when you have anything larger than a cutting board to build, it’s pretty tempting to reach for a power sander of some sort. The light-pressure sanding system tames the bad habits of the sanding process, while producing excellent results in very little time.
And best of all, it does this at low-cost in a build-it-yourself format. And if there’s one thing I know for sure about home handypeople, it’s that they love to save a little money doing things for themselves. |
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