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it will save a lot of the hand sanding that he has been doing.and when After we had some good craft shows I brought it for him. My husband has been wanting a drum sander to help finish off his cutting boards and other items that he makes. and with a larger table he is able to do bigger things. and he has been using it ever day since he has received it. we also just added the feed tables to it so it is even more helpfull to him.Any one that has a wood working shop could use the drum sander to help finish off their boards.
My husband loves this drum sander. We bought this when we got a big job building kitchen cabinets out of hickory. Since hickory is such a hard wood the planer just doesn't do the job without biting. It may take a while to get down to the correct thickness necessary but it gives a uniform finish. He has replaced the belts without any problems and is REALLY pleased with that aspect of the product.
The belts are expensive unless you make your own but that task requires a lot of time. I could NEVER succeed in sanding a board wider than 16 inches even though that is the claim (16-32). I find this sander a bit hard to use and find myself using my Porter Cable belt sander in most cases instead. This is very frustrating. On the positive side, the motor is powerful enough and well designed. I can change a belt on my Porter Cable in 10-15 seconds. And if you don't do this you will have uneven sanding.
I suppose if I used this sander on a daily basis I would conquer some of these hurdles. To do the job right you should change belts to finer grit often and be very patient to take off only a tiny bit of wood at a time or you burn the wood and the belt. This requires an absolute perfectly even gap between the table and the roller or you will see a "step" in the middle of the board. On the Jet it takes me 3-4 minutes. It is also difficult to perfectly level the gap between the table bed and the sander roller. If you are only going to use this sander occasionally, stick to you portable belt sander. The dust collection is effective (I use a 4" Jet dust collection system).
I kept feedrate running at least at 60%, and often faster (maybe 80%). They would have taken forever to do individually with ROS. I was taking off 1/64th at 100 and 120 grits, then 1/128th at 150,180,220.I did find the belt alignment a little finicky, even after plenty of break-in. But I could gang them with this machine and that worked great.I sanded all the way from 100 grit to 220 grit on this sander (I'll do another quick 220 grit with ROS before installation). I'm not sure that's a real problem if you have a unit that functions properly. Since the spindles had to end up witing about 1/128th of 1/2" square in order to fit a receiving mortise, the sander had to be dead on. However, note that there is understadably a bit of back lash, so I found that if I went slightly lower, then backed it back up to the setpoint, I could mitigate the backlash error.
And not just for the final sanding, but all the way through the grits. I was sanding Cherry. Meaning, I had to know to the 128th exactly what my square dimension would be after every grit. That's almost impossible to fully correct with machine adjustment.Anyway, bottom line is no regrets with this machine.
I used this sander to mass-sand ~300 1/2" square, 12"-24" long spindles for a set of Stickley'esque dining chairs. If I was sanding more aggresively, that could have been problematic -- but you're not trying to achieve a less-than-128th accuracy while sanding that aggressively, typically. So that's probably a moot point.I had no issues with throwing any breakers, as some have complained. I would occassionally have the red LED light up (which indicates governing of the belt speed) and the belt would indeed slow. The good news is that I was able to dial the head into a reliable/repeatable 128th left/right. I think the machine is probably fine -- I instead predict that the belt itself has a slightly tighter length/circumference on one side. No burning at 220. But if you stay on top of it, it's not a major problem.
That way, when I ended up at 220, I was neither too thin (which would have been really bad.)., nor too thick, which would mean several more passes at 180 or 220 grit to get it down to size (which would have been a lot of wasted effort). The 1/4 turn of the height adjustment handle worked repeatably, as well. But it does require more attention than I think should be necessary. Good luck to you.
It takes a time or two to get used to putting on the sandpaper, but once you've got it, it only takes a couple of minutes.Taking light passes with 80 grit gives me a nice surface but still easily removes planer or bandsaw marks. I'm mad at myself for living without a good thickness sander for so many years. There isn't a tremendous amount that I can add that hasn't been said, but I can tell you that I'm a little ticked off. I tripped the reset only once while trying it out and have put gobs of board feet through since and never had it happen again. I'm thrilled with the machine - use it for what it was designed for and it will treat you right. Tracking of the conveyor is not tough if you don't try an "over correct". With a cheap bicycle hook hung from the ceiling, you can hang your dust collector hose and it's out of your way and works great. When done, there is very little dust and it gets put away clean.
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