Abrasive planers

[Simon Fay]

www.irsauctions.com is your friend. Keep your eye out for used equipment and with a couple days of work - many of these tools can be restored to excellent working condition and you end up with something of much better quality.

[tadol]

The grizzly unit looks pretty nice, but when you get up to 5500 bucks, I'm inclined to think alot more about the workflow getting the stock to a dimension where its ready to run it abrasively - I've been looking at the Hammer A3-31 with the shear cutterhead - it should be able to get stock very cleanly to near exact dimension, and then running it thru a simple (inexpensive) drum sander to take that last tiny bit off and leave a sanded surface seems maybe better? I've been kinda lusting after a nice 12" long bed jointer, and the 12" planer with the shear cutters seems a major benefit. I have an Inca 570 with the Tersa head, and its pretty good at leaving a good planed surface (and I love the simple blade changes) but it is on 10" wide and the jointer is rather short bed, and all aluminum.

So, I guess I would be interested in what others are thinking about how a thicknessing sander fits into their workflow - Is it taking the place of a good planer, or any planer, or are you going straight from saw to sander? My woodwork is not luthiery specific, so that may be an influencing factor -

[j. Kinnaird]

Originally Posted by Chris Ensor

My wide belt takes up about the same amount of space as my old 16/32 and cost less than $1k after I put parts in it. Not bad.

You wanna sell it?
I need to look around for a cheaper used version.

[irvine]

Originally Posted by tadol

- I've been looking at the Hammer A3-31 with the shear cutterhead - it should be able to get stock very cleanly to near exact dimension, and then running it thru a simple (inexpensive) drum sander to take that last tiny bit off and leave a sanded surface seems maybe better?

Interesting, that you mention the Hammer A3-31, do you refer to the one with spiral cutter block?
I don`t know yet if it's useable for highly figured back and sides when they are very thin, but I recently used it for planing/jointing pieces for a flamed maple neck (in fact I used a friends Hammer C3-31 with Silent Power spiral cutter block), with perfect results, no tear out at all, and so smooth to work with!

For thickness sanding I use a Jet 22-44 oscillating drum sander with good results, although all woods will more or less clog to the abrasive paper.

http://www.feldergroupusa.com/us-us/...x-content-1144

[Tim McKnight]

Originally Posted by tadol

So, I guess I would be interested in what others are thinking about how a thicknessing sander fits into their workflow - Is it taking the place of a good planer, or any planer, or are you going straight from saw to sander? My woodwork is not luthiery specific, so that may be an influencing factor -

I've never had good success planing highly figured woods under 3/16" without having severe tear out or wood failure. Therefore, I use my wide belt sander to dimension wood under 3/16" thickness.

I use 60 grit belts to hog material off and follow up with 120 for the final two passes. When the belts load up with resin (which takes a LONG time) I spray them with Easy Off oven cleaner, let it work for 5 minutes, lightly scrub with a nylon brush then hose off with a garden hose. Let the belt dry over night and it's in as new condition. I've been doing this for 15 years on the original belts!

[BlmJn]

I have a Delta 18 drum sander and a Grizzly 15" wide belt sander that I bought used with very few hours on it. The Delta with a brand new belt may be a bit more accurate but looses that "edge" rapidly. Further, the feed belt wanders and requires attention. The 15" Grizzly is a "platen" type wide belt sander. With a backing board it does a good job of thicknessing. I use a backing board as I have found the feed belt is a bit soft and thin stock comes out a wee bit wavy. Probably due to the oscillator mushing the thin stock on the feed belt. I got the Grizzly at a really good price with 15 belts. Grizzly has since discontinued this model. It is open ended so backs and tops greater than 15" in width can be done. The Grizzly 18" wide belt sander may be slightly more favored because of greater width. However, it is not a platen sander. Both require 40 amp 220 v supply. Grizzly does have a 24" platen wide belt sander but it requires 80 amp 220 supply. I only have 100 amps available in my shop and would have had to knock out a door to put in the used 24" machine I located. So I went with the 15" machine and do not regret the decision.

[BlmJn]

Apparently Grizzly changed some features on the 15" wide belt sander and have reintroduced it as "NEW". I doubt that I would buy one new. Fo that kind of money I would consider the 18". I bought my 15" used at an extremely good price considering it was only a few months old.

[John Osthoff]

Hey John,

Yesterday, while getting a couple of builds going, I needed to thickness the sides. One set was mahogany and the other was rosewood. The rosewood set was very thick for sides (almost .200) but not thick enough to saw. I ended up making a lot of (very) expensive sawdust.

Anyway it was off to the 16/32 performax. The machine had 80 grit in there, and I went after the mahogany. Took about 5 minutes to get it exactly where I wanted them with great consistency over the entire length. I run the sides one at time, them rotate them around leaving the show side down. Sometimes there is a little taper from edge to edge because of the flexing in the cantilever, but if I creep into the finish cut with the rotating of the piece we are good to go.

The rosewood on the other hand was not as easy. I started with the 80 grit and that did not work out. (I should know better.) I only got about .005" off in about 10 minutes and I had to dress the drum during this process. I put on some 36 grit paper and went at it. It only takes about 30 seconds to change the paper. In about 8 minutes I was ready to go back to the lighter grit(s) to finish it up. Overall (once I went to the 36 grit) it only took me about 15 minutes to get this done.

Now if I was in the resaw business, and I was processing hundreds of sets, this would be totally unacceptable. A time-saver or some other wide belt would be in my shop.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to have something else, but the paper is cheap enough (I get it in 100' lengths) and usually buy it at a woodworking show on sale. Keeping good paper on there really helps

For what it worth ...

[j. Kinnaird]

Thats actually very good advice. The practical side of me completely sees the merit in what you are saying. On the other shoulder is a devil that likes new equipment. Im holding off. Truthfully I like the way the 16-32 tapers the edges of top and back plates.

[Brad Goodman]

I started with a Performax 16-32 that a friend of mine gave me when he got out of his woodworking hobby.
I traded up to the Performax 22-44. Both machines worked OK. The biggest problem I had was gumming up the paper on woods like rosewood and ziricote.

I found a very slightly used grizzly 18" widebelt on Craigslist 8 years ago for $1800. I had to rent a truck with a tailgate lift ($200) and drive 3 hours roundtrip to get it.

I looked on ebay and Craigslist for years before I found it.

The difference is like comparing a Chevy to a Rolls Royce.

I love this machine. Never had to do one thing to it and it is probably the most used machine in my shop.

[dberkowitz]

I use the Powermatic DDS 225, which is a dual drum, 25" wide machine. It does the job, but like all drum sanders, you have to be judicious about how much you take off, what grit you use and so forth. My colleague downstairs has it (we share tools -- I his table saw and thickness sander, he my drill press and band saw. His dust collection on the sander isn't what it should be and I think its performance would be better if he had better extraction. The paper does get fouled on really resinous wood, and that's a pain in the ***. That's the trouble with the drum sanders vs the wide belt -- the wide belts don't get fouled as much because they don't get as hot.

[JSDenvir]

John, I've had the Supermax 19-38 for 2 years now, and it was pretty much perfect right out of the box.

Not a wide belt sander, but not too far off.

Steve
denvir guitars.com

[justonwo]

I've heard this guy can be kind of an abrasive planer.

[geordie1]

My experience of the smaller machines available to most of us is not great. It depends on your needs/preferences. I had a Jet sander for a while. I used it a couple of times and put it on eBay. And you're not just buying a sander. If it's any good, you're going to need VERY good extraction too.

In the end the small machines are toys in comparison to what cabinet shops usually have so I find it much better to go down to the local cabinet shop (I've done this in the UK and now in Germany) and sand a bunch of tops and backs in one go. The results are far superior and the stress/mess/cost far less than doing it myself. When I worked for Sobell, Stefan did exactly the same, and these days he travels over to Fylde to use their machine which is much more like what you'd find in a cabinet shop.

Nigel

[Martin Keith]

I have the near-ubiquitous Delta 18-32 that was sold through Woodworker's Supply and others. It's now discontinued, but there are tons of them out there.

This machine was, in my opinion, the best of the 'hobby'-level (read: sub-$1K) machines out there because it has a stationary drum in a welded frame, and a traveling platen. All the machines with traveling drums seem to suffer from major rigidity issues - Tom Ribbecke has one of the old Performax open-end machines, and told me he has to adjust for parallelism based on the depth of cut he plans to take, and the species. Seems like a lousy workflow.

I made one modification to the Delta that greatly improved it, which was to fabricate a 1/4" thick aluminum plate to 'close in' the open end, making it a fully-enclosed 4-sided box. This limits sanding width to 18", but that's not a real problem for guitarmaking.

I measured deflection at the tip of the upper arm (where the drum is located) with a dial indicator, before and after the modification. Prior, there was a .010"-.015" wobble in the arm tip when free-running the drum (i.e. no load), and the deflection was visible to the naked eye when the stock first hit the drum.

Following the modification, there was .002" of wobble on the arm running unloaded, and no visible deflection under load. I also noticed that I could take more aggressive cuts, likely because the rigid structure transferred more motor power directly into drum rotation.

The fab was pretty easy - I used a mill to cut clearance holes for the various bolt heads etc., but it could be done with a drill press also. The hardest part was bending it into a shallow "Z" shape to lay on the surfaces of the machine, but that wasn't too bad - I used a piece of 3/4" aluminum rod as a bending fulcrum, and some 6" C-clamps to flex it into place against a chunk of 8/4 mahogany. It was controllable and quick.

Post-modification, I think this machine would outrun almost anything short of the big dual-drum 25" monsters. I'd still love to have a widebelt, but my 300 sq. ft. just won't allow it!

Cheers,
Martin