Drum sander for surface planing?

[transatlantic]

It'll be a while before I get planer, so in the mean time I'm looking for other options. I know of the router table method and the table saw method, but both suffer from not being able to surface plane wide pieces of more than 80mm or so. You can turn the piece around to effectively give you twice the cutting height, but I think it'll be a pain to keep it accurate. So I was wondering about the idea of having a homemade planer, but instead of the drum having knifes, it would be some low grit paper? Mostly because it would be much easier to make and I'd trust that a lot more than a homemade system with spinning sharp bits!

So it would work like this :

but be build into a proper base unit with long infeed and outfeed tables like this :

The main issue I guess will be how much you can cut off, but I'd be happy if it could take off 0.5mm at most, and just use a lot of passes. I'd have to play about with the grits for a speed/finish compromise. I'm guessing 60 - 80?

What other issues would there be?

 

[rafezetter]

umm isn't that called a drum sander? Plenty of homemade versions of them - both utilised as a planer style with the drum underneath and working from above, or a combo unit planer style and thickness sander.

The issues you mention have all been discussed and figured out for drum sander versions. I'm in the process of SLOWLY making a drumsander and will use zirconium 40grit purely for thicknessing, but having a sled for edge sanding would be simple too.

 

[sunnybob]

yup. its a drum sander. check out utube vids by mathias wendel and stumpy nubs to start with, but theres lots of them about.

I bought a lunchbox thicknesser, great for planks, which can also (with a bit of ingenuity) be used as a planer.

But my go to tool for thicknessing small pieces and small thicknesses is the router mounted on a sled. Very quick and easy, and can be packed away after use.

 

[Paddy Roxburgh]

By the time you've made that you could have learnt to use a hand plane. Once you've got used to sharpening the iron it really isn't that difficult and will completely transform your woodworking in so many ways and takes hardly any space and makes no noise and uses no power. I'm no master craftsman but can achieve a flat surface, thickness a board and square and edge with the minimum of fuss. Don't get too mystified by people talking about all the different planes, one number 4 or five record/stanley (or equivalent) will do anything you need (although to be honest I use many more, but it's not necessary).
Paddy

 

[custard]

The main issue I guess will be how much you can cut off, but I'd be happy if it could take off 0.5mm at most, and just use a lot of passes.

I don't think 0.5mm per pass is do-able on a home made drum sander. Even with big industrial sanders you rarely go beyond 0.2mm on hardwoods. I currently use an Axi ST-480 drum sander with 80 grit paper, and I only aim at 0.1mm per pass on hardwood. You could go a bit beyond that with much coarser grit, but then you're left with a lot of additional finishing to do. I mainly use a drum sander for saw cut veneers, removing the bandsaw marks and taking the veneer down from say a cut thickness of 2.0mm to a final veneer thickness of about 1.2mm. It's fine for that, but as a serious tool for dimensioning timber it's just not really practical. Besides the extremely limited capacity it's a faff dealing with the way drum sanders dub over the leading and trailing edges of the workpiece, yes there are workarounds for that, but if you had to implement them over scores of passes you'd lose the will to live.

If you haven't got a planer/thicknesser then either just use a bench plane, or alternatively use a bench plane to roughly flatten one face and then use a lunch box/bench top thicknesser. That's the system I used for many years in a single garage sized workshop, and I still managed to turn out plenty of solid, hardwood furniture. A drum sander is a useful tool if you're a luthier, or for saw cut veneering, or you're cleaning up Poplar face frames for kitchen units; but as a substitute for a planer thicknesser it's a non starter.

Good luck!

 

[transatlantic]

umm isn't that called a drum sander? Plenty of homemade versions of them - both utilised as a planer style with the drum underneath and working from above, or a combo unit planer style and thickness sander.

The issues you mention have all been discussed and figured out for drum sander versions. I'm in the process of SLOWLY making a drumsander and will use zirconium 40grit purely for thicknessing, but having a sled for edge sanding would be simple too.

I've not seen a home made drum sander like I am talking about. I'm talking about a drum sander that looks like the second image. The one by stumpy nubs has a very small infeed/outfeed.

 

[Ttrees]

Have you thought about the force(mad wobbling inaccuracy) that you
will get from that drum ...
I bought one of those drums years ago from Axi for use with a industrial food processor (robot coupe)
Was gong to make a spindle sander...
What a waste of time ....
The only way that you could get it to work is by having another bearing on the other end to counter the centrifugal force mentioned .
I have collected an old angle grinder from a skip ,and was going to make this contraption but deemed the heavy robot coupe motor to be too good for the purpose .
Plus if you look at a proper bobbin sander ,it moves up and down too, to counter burning and make use of all the paper.
Maybe a power planer might be the route to here ?

 

[Ttrees]

Hi again
What about a router planing jig AKA router sled ?

Could some sort of Japanese hand planing style be applied to your needs ?
I'm sure I saw something suitable before using the kanna, you might need to rig something up, using wedges
and a box ..
I had a quick look but can't find, probably at least two videos of what I describe ..yet ...
Maybe this be one ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_sGwQ3 ... xVZ_rsjZ5h


You don't mention what kind of woodworking you're doing ...fine cabinetmaking ?
If so.... It would be more than likely, that it would be necessary to take a pass with a hand plane anyway after
using a jointer ...someone will be along to correct me on this though .

I use a dead flat bench top composite material ...before that I was going to use a fire door which was dead flat,
but wider ...either way I use a technique for planing that is extremely sure/accurate .
Its the same principal as machinists blue for marking the high spots ...but I use crayons .
You can stay very put using this method and not be checking over and back all the time .
Good luck

 

[dzj]

+1 for the router sled.
For edge jointing, clamp 2 boards together and use a hand plane.
There are planes made specially for this purpose, but a Jack plane will work OK too.

 

[pcb1962]

So it would work like this :

What other issues would there be?

The bearings in the drill press are not designed for a lateral loading such as this, I would expect to end up with a very wobbly drill after any significant amount of use.

 

[RobinBHM]

Sanding an edge wont produce an accurate dimensioned component.

The amount of material removed will vary according to density and anything other than hard rubber or steel will dub edges.

Wide belt industrial sanders have either hard rubber rollers of around 80 shore hardness or steel for the first roller and the abrasive belt oscillates from side to side to reduce clogging and thus burning.

 

[Racers]

So it would work like this :



What other issues would there be?

The bearings in the drill press are not designed for a lateral loading such as this, I would expect to end up with a very wobbly drill after any significant amount of use.

The bearings in drill presses are just standard bearings like the ones I have in my motorbike wheels which have big side loads and don't wear out.
Most bearings used are of the shelf ones, not designed for a specific use that would require a limited run and massive costs, so people design stuff around standard parts.

I can't see a drum sander producing a decent result, you might as well just glue up straight from the table saw.
Hand planing is quiet and rewarding it lets you get in touch with the wood.

Pete

 

[transatlantic]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Seems you pretty much all agree that it is a no go though The reason I thought it might work is because with my experience with belt sanders and a low grit, if you leave it still for even a fraction of a second, it can dig right in, taking out a lot of material. So I don't really understand why this wouldn't also remove a large amount of material? I guess a belt sander has more surface area on it's rotating belt in contact with the wood than would be the case here which might explain it.

Not sure why the drill press has come up, if I was going to do it, it would be built like a jointer, like in the second image, a drum attached to bearings on either side.

 

[Ttrees]

The belt sander gets pretty slow after a while ...
When I first got mine,it was soo fast/aggressive ...
Their should be a pot on these things to account for belt wear .
I will add, whatever bearing on the other end would probably get clogged /heat up and die...
Cant say for sure though ?
If it did work and you had unlimited sandpaper, you would need at least a 3HP cyclone dust extractor .
Why do you think that sanding is a better solution than say, at least attempting to jig up an electric hand planer until you get a proper surfacer ? Apart from the fact that, then you would have two surfacers ?
Oh , don't bother buying that drum ,even if you decide to do this ...as Its just a plastic tube filled with filler .
Have you got a hand plane ,and have you ever got the iron sharp enough to shave hair off your forearm with one swipe .this is how sharp a plane iron needs to be.

 

[transatlantic]

The belt sander gets pretty slow after a while ...
When I first got mine,it was soo fast/aggressive ...
Their should be a pot on these things to account for belt wear .
I will add, whatever bearing on the other end would probably get clogged /heat up and die...
Cant say for sure though ?
If it did work and you had unlimited sandpaper, you would need at least a 3HP cyclone dust extractor .
Why do you think that sanding is a better solution than say, at least attempting to jig up an electric hand planer until you get a proper surfacer ? Apart from the fact that, then you would have two surfacers ?
Oh , don't bother buying that drum ,even if you decide to do this ...as Its just a plastic tube filled with filler .
Have you got a hand plane ,and have you ever got the iron sharp enough to shave hair off your forearm with one swipe .this is how sharp a plane iron needs to be.

I want to be able to square up my own rough sawn boards of up to about 5ft in length (for big projects), which I'll want to be doing pretty often. If it was just a one off board, then I'd quite happly use a router sled, but doing that for each board on each new project just sounds painful. I figured I could take maybe 8 or so passes through the drum sander with a low grit, and then pass that through my thicknesser for the final pass much quicker than I could plane the surface using a router sled. It just seemed like a much easier approach to the problem until I have a jointer.

I don't think I'd be buying the drum, I'd be making it myself as per some of the videos you see online. I think I have confused people with that first image. That was just supposed to show the sanding vs planing idea, not the actual implementation.

 

[Ttrees]

Have you got a hand plane ,and have you ever got the iron sharp enough to shave hair off your forearm with one swipe .this is how sharp a plane iron needs to be.

You have not used a hand plane unless its this sharp

 

[transatlantic]

Have you got a hand plane ,and have you ever got the iron sharp enough to shave hair off your forearm with one swipe .this is how sharp a plane iron needs to be.

You have not used a hand plane unless its this sharp

I haven't mentioned anything about hand planes. They're just not practical for my particular case.

 

[dzj]

If you have a thicknesser, you can make one of those sleds, so it will also work as a planer.

Here's a simple one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UONmuQt_98

 

[Ali]

If you are going to go down the sanding route then I would drop the idea of a drum/bobbin type sander and use a belt sander setup instead. Plus find one that fits a belt sanding frame and you will be set up for both planes of any board.

 

[PAC1]

What is wrong with a hand plane until you buy a planer. A good tuned hand plane will sort 5 ft board much quicker than you might think. Also if you have a lunch box thicknesser then the planing does not need to be to produce a finished edge just a reference face. You can then use the thicknesser on all four faces