Thread: Newbie question - JET 10/20 drum sander

Welcome Marco.

I have an older 16/32 sanding thicknesser.

It is good for slowly reducing thickness. I have used it on big lumps of wood and thin pieces.

It should suit your purposes.

A regular thicknesser would be much quicker but it has a couple of limitations.

You need to make a sled to carry thin pieces though a thicknesser.

If you have timber that is inclined to tearout, it will cause you problems. Keeping the blades sharp can reduce tearout but not eliminate it. The sanding thicknesser is much better for these timbers.

It does leave parallel sanding marks on the timber. They may be acceptable for your purpose but if you want a good furniture finish it will need ROS sanding.

The dust extractor should be fine. You don't need a lot of power but you do need one connected.

Hi Marco

I'll second what Scally said.

I've got the bigger brother Jet 22/44 and have been very happy with it. I would say other than the size, the specifications would be pretty much the same as the 10/20.

It can sand pieces down to around the 2mm mark, so you've got a fair bit of flexibility with timber thickness. I've found the best way to get a truly uniform thickness is at the final thickness, run the timber through a few times at the same setting so you can just hear sandpaper contact being made with the timber. This way, with a good set of digital callipers, you can get accuracy of 0.1 mm or better.

The Sandpaper Man (who advertises on this forum) now has 320 grit sandpaper for the drum sanders, and it leaves a good finish. Depending on the type of pieces you make, this could be an adequate finish for you.

Also as Scally mentioned, at those thicknesses, I've found the thicknesser to be more trouble than it's worth. Great for thicker pieces, but it can chew up the thinner pieces, even with sharp blades.

Regards

Des

Coincidentally, I resawed some timber down to about 3mm while trying out my new bandsaw, and thought I'd try running it through my JET jointer/thicknesser to see how thin I could get down to. I made a sled, but the limitation on minimum thickness seems to be the anti-kickback pawls before the cutterhead, which bottom out at a thickness of around 2.5mm. At this setting a few pieces went though OK, but then one or two samples with cranky grain just got big lumps ripped out of the middle of them by the cutterhead. Your mileage will vary with the timber used, but a thicknesser clearly isn't the best tool for the job.

I've considered drum sanders too, but could only afford one of the smaller ones. Some questions for owners of the 10/20 or 16/32 class machines (or equivalents from Carbatec/H&F); do they produce much snipe on the ends of boards, and how uniform are the finished boards across the width? Provided you don't try to take too much off in a pass, can the smaller machines produce results similar to a JET 22/44 (for example) on smaller pieces? I'm mainly interested in material of box-making dimensions, i.e. boards rarely wider than 150mm.

I know you can spend a lot of time adjusting the drum to be exactly parallel to the baseplate, but does it hold this accurately to give uniform thickness across the piece? Or do you just run the timber through in both directions to compensate for any error?

Any thoughts much appreciated !

I've got a 22/44 jet. I reckon it's the bees knees. Yes they can be a bit of a bugger to set up accurately initially, but once set I find it remains accurate for extended periods of time. Can go out of setting with rough handling of the machine, ie: running the small (too bl@@dy small) wheels over bits of scrap on the floor. Treat it nice like you should with all your equipment and it will serve you well. I regularly use mine for material from 10mm wide to 300mm wide and get very accurate repeatable results. The key is with the finer grits to pass the material through at the same setting a couple or three times. Small depth of cut also helps. If you do this you will pretty much eliminate snipe. When I do my small boxes I sand the board down to 320, give it a couple of light coats of shellac. Let that dry for a day or so and then cut the sides to length and do the joinery. Light hand sand and finish the exterior, done.

And yeah, if your stuck, you can run the material through both ways and get the result you are looking for.



Cheers

The JET 10/20 looks great but it may be overkill for modelmaking work? It all depends whether you have a spare $1k+, doesn't it?

At a much smaller scale, I just bought a HOG thickness sander for modelmaking, and it's a little beauty. Delivery from the USA was quick and surprisingly inexpensive, when you buy it without the motor (I hooked it up to a motor from a cheap GMC benchtop tablesaw ($49.95 at BigW! ) that I retired a few years after I realised what a complete piece of junk it was, but you can use a power drill equally effectively). It takes material up to 1" thick and 3" wide and will sand down to paper thin. Perfect for modelmaking etc.



THE HOG THICKNESS SANDER

Without the motor it was only US$179 plus shipping.

thank you for all the suggestions. It seems that the Jet will do what I am after.
Tony I have looked at the hog sander as at the Byrnes one and the proxxon, the general problem with those machine is the small width they accept. When doing the frames I prefer to get all the timber to size before start cutting so I have more freedom to place the pieces in function of the vein of the wood. Still for that price it worth consideration

thanks

Marco

No worries Marco, I'd be very happy to own a Jet 10/20 too. One of these days...

Are you building ship models? I'd love to see some of your work.

Originally Posted by Tony Hunt

No worries Marco, I'd be very happy to own a Jet 10/20 too. One of these days...

Are you building ship models? I'd love to see some of your work.

Hi Tony,

I am currently doing the rigging of a 1:50 american cutter. It is a bash kit, pretty much I bought the kit, checked it out and decided to keep some basic pieces and built it completely from scratch. The quality was, in my opinion, so low that I decided from now on to build scratch models. While finishing my current model, I am setting up for the next one a 1:24 model of a french barque longue. I started at checking the plans on the computer (to correct some incongruence) and sourcing the wood and cutting it to size, and that is when I got across the thickness problem.
If you want have a look at my current work you can find it here
Long John's Café Forum • Leggi argomento - Revenue Cutter - da kit Corel

it is an Italian website but you just need to look at the pictures

Looks good Marco. I especially like the fact that you're already starting another before finishing the one you're working on. You'll fit in well around here!