I’m not a big gizmo fan, but doing a run of 8 gift saws in the local equivalent to a dense tropical hardwood with a gazillion inconsistent curves and gobs of endgrain is too trying on the patience bone these days. In the last large, commercial shop I worked in back in the ‘80’s we had a couple of neato spindle sanders with pneumatic rubber drums that blew up with air to the hardness and curve required for sanding odd shapes.Originally posted by Billy:
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You mean for the lathe or grinder, or a freestanding unit? Give us a report when you've wrung it out.....broke down and ordered one of those pneumatic, blow-up drum sanders that will hopefully do away with a lot of the hand sanding.
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Remembering that, I went looking for them and found Canadian company Sandboss….carried by Woodworker’s Supply, Rockler and others. Sixty bucks for a set…about what you’d expect these days. But upon receipt, I was immediately pleased that these are industrial-quality tools, not short-lived tinkertoys, and immediately put them to work on the big Rockwell drill press. They are advertised to work with handheld drills, too.
They blow up with a shraeder valve and hand pump to a psi range from just enuf to hold the sanding sleeve to hard as a rubber drum sander.
I begin with the smallest drum and do the tight spots with 220 grit at 1250 rpm…they are rated at 5000rpm but that’d take off too much material too fast for my taste…
…switch to the middle-sized drum and 220 to do the next larger curves…
…and finish up doing the bulk of the sanding and all the endgrain with the large drum. I keep a damp towel on hand both to raise the grain after each drum and to check for any remaining tool marks.
Found out the hard way you need all three drums…. the smaller ones, even with 220, leave too many flats on the larger curves which require the relatively softer large drum.
These soft drums are surprisingly aggressive….I didn’t need any grit but 220 to go from a roundover-bit, 50-grit drumsanded surface to a finished surface. A heavy touch using the center of the drum removes tool marks and cleans up endgrain….a heavy touch at the harder top or bottom edge of the drum remove material as fast as a rasp….and a light touch using the center will finish the piece off. The end result is minimal flats and hand sanding using 220 and 320.
Rockler carries them, but the abrasive sleeves they carry are way too stiff and only come in grits thru 120…too coarse. The same tools are 10 bucks cheaper at Woodworkers Supply, who carries thinner sleeves in all the grits thru 220. Woodworker’s also has warehouses in Wyoming and N.C and ships the next day, faster than Rockler.
These in a cordless drill may be just the thing to sand major linear feet of rounded rails and guards on yer boat….the end result in time and quality is what I remember from those industrial spindle sanders:
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