Thread: Homemade sander - simple project

Here's a simple project which has a good return for a few hours work.

I know quite a few people have made this type of sander so please forgive me if this is going over old ground.

Requirements were a small sheet of mdf, some threaded rod and 2 nuts to fit, a short length of 50mm pvc, a belt from a small belt sander, and some screws, nuts and bolts. And of course course I"m assuming you have a lathe handy. It took about 4 hours to make and fine tune. This includes making the drum, which was made from an mdf core with the rod threaded through and fixed on either side with the nuts, then turned to 50mm diameter on the lathe, then the pvc pipe was banged over and covered with double sided tape to give it some grip on the belt.

Any type of sander is necessarily limited in its application - which I guess is why we all own so many of them. This one is notionally a drum sander but its limitations are that its not suitable for thickness sanding, it doesnt work particularly well with coarse grits. Its more a finish sander. The drum pokes up above the height of the table by only a tiny amount (so the workpiece rides smoothly across the table) so its not suitable for removing a lot of stock quickly.

It works well though, and it will sand things which I have no other way of doing (dont own a drum sander). An example is in the last photo - a little mitred square of timber - whose joints were not done particularly neatly. I wont use an ROS for something like this because it tends to round over the edges - so you loose the crisp, sharp look. Ditto hand sanding. I wont use a linisher because it will likely sand one end more aggressively then the other. With this type of sander, though, the workpiece rests largely on the table so the angle of presentation to the sanding medium doesnt change and the edges stay crisp and sharp.

If I remade this (as I will, this is more a prototype) I would make it with the front edge of the table spring loaded and adjusted with wedges. This would give me the ability to instantly adjust the height of the table in relation to the drum.

Changing grits is as easy as flipping open the top, freeing the drum and replacing it with another home made drum (assuming you made two and loaded each with different grits).

cheers
Arron