Thickness drum sanders

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Antiquity

Antiquity

Well-known member
I may want to purchase (maybe) a thickness drum sander for making thin boards, 0.032" to 0.500" all ±0.055" in thickness. Grizzly has a 10" wide, 1/4" min. thickness sander. Jet has a 10" open end, 1/32" min. thickness. Both look okay until you read the reviews. Poor customer service, poor tracking and hard to apply a new roll of sandpaper. Does anyone have one of these machines and if so do you have problems with it? Any recommendations? It seems like the days of making good quality machines are yet to come!

Thanks,
Dennis Bork
 
I have an older Performax (later acquired by Jet) 16-32 open ended drum sander, and it's the least favorite tool in my shop. It's not hard to adjust the machine to give a very flat surface that is 32" wide without a dip or hill in the middle, but that's about the only good thing I can say. It eats expensive sandpaper like crazy unless you use very coarse grits, and changing paper is a pain - it's difficult to secure the end of the wrap, even with the tool they provided. It is also excruciatingly slow - if you try to take off too much in one pass, it will stall and leave a divot, or trip the circuit breaker. The only two things I use it for now are to (1) roughly level surface a board that is too wide for my 13" planer or (2) to level a glued-up chessboard or the like. Even then, I only use very coarse grit sandpaper, knowing that I will have a lot of random orbit sanding to do afterwards.
 
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