Hi I'm a newbie who foolishly bought a cheap sander from Aldi. It's a Challenge 710/4789D. It melted its drive belt! True, it melted it. When I stripped the machine down I could see the reason for this. The axis of the shaft that the driven pulley runs on was skewed relative to the one for the drive pulley. Also as the belt came off the driven pulley at an angle it rubbed against the baseplate and got very hot. The cause of the leaning shaft is twofold. First there is a hole in the casing under its lower bearing which had protrusions out of its side and second that the holes in the top and bottom (plastic) bearing housings are not truly circular. These two factors allow the bearings to get out of alignment. It looks as if the manufacturer made a mistake with the drilling of these holes. I say this because for some reason they have inserted a (brass) cap under the lower bearing. This rests on what small part of the edge protrusions in the hole it can find and this is supposed to hold the bearing straight and hence shaft upright. But it doesn't work properly of course. I know I can fix it but it's the last cheap power tool I ever want to buy from Aldi. I admit that Challenge isn't Aldi's tool name. Maybe their tools have improved? Do they supply instructions for dismantling and repairing their tools? Can we buy spare parts for them? The only spare I could get for this Challenge was a drive belt. I got it from Solent Tools. They were very helpful. But the belt cost £9 which seems expensive. My question is - should I apply grease to the driving and driven (metal) helical gear wheels that turn the driven roller and pull the grinding belt? I ask because wood dust sticks to grease very well and the machine was full of grease. What does wood dust do to gear wheels?
Badly made hand held belt sander
- Thread starter woolyhead
- Start date
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Phil Pascoe
Established Member
I assume it was more than 3yrs old? Their stuff usually has a 3yr guarantee.
Hi phil.p. No it wasn't even 3 years old but then again I'm an idiot. I asked about this sander at the Ely branch of Aldi and couldn't get much sense out of them. They gave me a phone number for Aldi After Sales Service and it failed to connect. I asked again and got a different number. The new number gave me a third number and when I finally got through they wanted to know the shop's product code for the sander plus two other things about the purchase. I'd forgotten the last two and couldn't find the required code anywhere, not even on the box. Without this they refused to do anything. That's when I told them I'd never buy a power tool from them again and stripped the sander down to fix it myself. I've made a drawing of how it's constructed.
