Phillip Gregory
01-07-2013, 12:51 AM
I have a new Porter-Cable 362V belt sander that I was using to knock the roughness off of some 2" pine with some 80 grit sandpaper. After using it to sand two 8-foot boards (which took less than five minutes), it smelled like there was something getting hot. I touched the edge of both the front and rear wheels and they were burning hot to touch. The belt was a bidirectional belt so it wasn't on backwards. It was tracking perfectly fine and appeared to sand as expected. I let it cool to the touch which took about 20 minutes and then went back and sanded another board, and the wheels got hot after about two minutes of operation. Is this normal or is the belt tension or something out of whack? I don't remember any other belt sander running this hot, but this is far larger and heavier of a unit than anything else I've used before and that wood was pretty rough/ugly stuff so I imagine there would be a lot of friction. If this is normal, how hot do you let the wheels get? I would be somewhat nervous about letting them get too hot as I don't want to cook the lube out of the bearings and have them fail.