Pneumatic Drum sanders

I know you specified a drum that will chuck into your drillpress, but have you given consideration to a hand-held unit?

small:
http://grizzly.com/products/4-x-1-1-8-Hand-Held-Pneumatic-Drum-Sanders/H2881

large:
http://grizzly.com/products/7-1-2-x-2-1-4-Hand-Held-Pneumatic-Drum-Sanders/H2882


I've been thinking about purshasing one of these for well over a year now, and have never got around to it

all the best,

R

 

I prefer to guide the wood through the tool whenever possible. I got this one. One of the best spent $200 ever. It includes a smaller diam pneumatic drum that you can replace the flap sander with.

 

Hmmm, these look nice.
Christmas present?
Do you use the flap sanding attachment? If so, for what operations is it handy with?
I wonder if i can modify my dad's benchtop grinder like this?

 

I used it once for removing router marks from a body. It worked well.

 

Same here! Maybe if we link up our noggin's, we can come up with something

 

If the grinder has an internal motor (as opposed to separate motor and arbor) I'd think that the speed might not be right for sanding... I could be wrong, of course, but I think my grinder runs much faster than my drill (in which I use small sanding drums) or my oscilating spindle sander...

 

Wilser - does that drum have any "give" to it, say, enough that if you pressed the wood into it, it would contour a bit to the radius you want for the back of your neck? Or is it fairly solid once inflated?

 

The drums are pneumatic and you can inflate them to the desired stiff ness (or lack of it!).

As for using a grinder, I doubt it would perform because of the bearings,motor power, motor shaft. Just check out other similar machines and also buffers and you'll see they always have big motors with long ,big diam shafts.

 

when you use the drum on your necks to profile them, do you inflate until they are stiff, or do you leave sime "cushion" in them?

If you don't inflate them all the way, do you experience issues of the sanding sleeve slipping?

 

I inflate them to about 7psi, so it has some give. The point of this tool is to remove the flat sanding marks left by the belt sander. I have not experienced any slipping, yet.

 

So you are using the belt sander to do most of the actual profiling, and then using the pneumatic drum to clean it up?

 

yes. I do take a 45 deg cut on the neck with the bandsaw to remove the bulk before going to the sanders. Even after the pneumatic there's a little bit that can has to be done by hand and/or with the RO sander, but it's much faster now and way less hard on my shoulders I carved 4 necks in just under 2 hours on the last batch.

 

I'm gonna have to try that out... my current methor is to rough profile on the bandsaw to within 1/8" or so, attack with microplane (I am using a 2" Microplane drum chucked into my 1/2" drill), then RO sander, and sandpaper in hand (320 grit and higner, up through Micromesh). Takes well over an hour to do a neck, and is reasonably physical

 

that's just the drum, not the machine!

 

I got the aluminum oxide sleeves.

by the way, I think the smaller machine that shows up on the amazon pic has been discontinued for a while since it doesn't show up on the grizzly catalog even as far back as the 2006 one.