Thread: Wide drum sanders- anyone fitted a digital readout

Jet 1836 with an iGaging DRO. Battery needed replacing last time I went to use it - annoyingly - after a couple of years. Big improvement over original scale and pointer.

The reader is fixed to the motor cooling fins with a tee slot nut. Top and bottom of scale used supplied brackets. Cable is way too long. Will shorten it one day but will need to cut and reconnect inside reader which may destroy it!

Leigh








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I've thought about it and I even have one sitting idle that would do the job.

In practice, I'm not sure how useful it would be. When I need to do something with real precision with mine, I just get close to it then sneak up on the final setting armed with vernier callipers.

That is pretty much the same as I do now.
But my sander is pretty much on its' last legs. So I am looking for a replacement.
Thinking a dro would be good.

I worked in a shop that had a DRO on a big danckert sander, it was okay but if you pushed the machine hard, the stock would crush down into the conveyor and give a different size than the dro was saying as it was mounted to the bottom table the belt was on, also, if you adjusted the platen, it would change the cut amount also, and the dro wouldn’t alter. So most of the time I would just use verniers to measure, accurately.

As river builder outlined DRO have limited benefits on a drum sander, you could send two boards in at the same setting and both boards will come out slightly different thickness. This could be due to a number of factors such as how evenly worn your belt is, plus every time you change belts you'll need to readjust the DRO.

Plus drum sanders remove stock so slowly that vernier calipers is actually the quickest way to verify if your material is actually the correct thickness.

Yes. I fitted an iGuageing (sp?) to my Carbatec generic.

Wonderful.

If any of the situations happened above, it was a trivial matter of inserting the stock into the end of the reader and pressing calibrate. It zeroed it off perfectly. Absolutely exact.

Never had a real problem though, but it did chew batteries. I simply bought a big roll of them off ebay for $10. Think I've still 50 left! Though I did tend to pop the battery out a tad if I was going to be a while between jobs.

It was excellent for doing box lids or when production work needed me to winch the height up and down between parts. I made (make??) boxes for kids stores and they all needed a finished height of 80mm on the top lip. I used the sander the get everything perfect before hinging.

Ok. Thanks for the replies.
I think I'll just go with a replacement sander and work as it seems most do.
Get close with jointer and thicknesser and use digital calipers to creep up on dimensions.
Looks like a new Carbatec jobbie is the way to go for me.
Just got to hope for a "sale". That'd help. ��

On my Carbatec, each full wind of the handle is 1.8mm

This makes it easy to measure things out pretty accurately!

With my boxes, I could punch through 25 at a time to get them all "close", then simply trim them to exact height with a wind to the right "quarter" of the handle quadrant.

Very easy.

Ive found mine to be an excellent machine.