Drum Sander Cleaning Tip
George VondriskaDescription
An abrasive cleaning stick can go a long way toward keeping your sandpaper clean and unclogged. Why is that a big deal? Clogged sandpaper won’t sand effectively, and will probably burn your stock. This is especially true on surface sanders. However, what can you do when a simple cleaning isn’t enough? Is it possible to get those tough clogs and burns out of the paper on your drum sander? Probably. The key is in using something a little more aggressive than an abrasive cleaning stick.
What’s the magic ingredient?
You’re probably wondering what the trick is. If a cleaning stick won’t do it, what will? You may not expect this answer, but a piece of polycarbonate is the answer. Available at home centers, polycarbonate can do an amazing job of getting tough spots out of paper on your drum sander. The only problem with the approach? It puts a gross smell in your shop at your cleaning the sandpaper.
Tips on using a cleaning stick
Abrasive cleaning sticks are really incredible and work great for cleaning surface sanding belts, but there are a few good tricks for using them. Especially when they start to get small, and you don’t want to get your pinkies too close to the sanding drum.
The final puzzle piece
Knowing how to clean the abrasive on your drum sander isn’t much good if you’re not familiar with wrapping sandpaper on a surface sander. Don’t sweat it, we’re here to help you with that.
Sandpaper on this drum, I know, is a mess. I just sent some pine through there. I've talked before about using an abrasive cleaning stick to clean these abrasive rolls. Now, we'll do that but I think what we're going to find is that out here where it's really gummed up, this is not going to be robust enough to get that clean and that's gonna be a problem. Let's try this first and then we'll see what happens next and I'll show you another tip if this thing doesn't work as well as it needs to. Well, that's an improvement. A lot of that junk came out but down here what really has happened is that, especially with pine and cherry, woods that are kind of gummy, what happens is the resin gets into the abrasive and if you keep going at that point, the resin warms up. It melts into the abrasive and this just can't get that stuff out. This, however, does a pretty darn good job. This is a piece of polycarbonate from a home center. It's important that it's polycarbonate. What I've done is just grabbed it in one of the Kreg clamps so that I have something good to hold on to. Let me go after these marks with this stuff. The other thing that's going to happen here, you don't have smell-o-vision so you're not gonna know, it does give off a pretty lousy odor but it does a nice job at cleaning out those tough buildups. That is a huge improvement. It's gonna let us continue to use this portion of the sandpaper. If you can't get that junk out you'll end up with a strip of sandpaper where you shouldn't be sending wood under there anymore cause you're gonna burn it because there's such a buildup in the abrasive. It always seems, ironically, like those buildups like to happen right in the middle of the drum. So, it really limits what you can do. Again, the key to this is, that's a chunk of polycarbonate available at any home center and it really does a nice job of getting out the tough stains.
Polycarbonate (Lexan) is stronger than acrylic (Plexiglas). Cutting acrylic with a table or band saw creates lots of messy shards. It appears that the resin on the paper sticks to the melting plastic and then flies off in your shop. I haven't used polycarbonate but I did check the prices of it and it's probably cheaper to just replace the sandpaper on the drum.
Do you know if acrylic will work the same as polycarbonate for this trick? I have lots of acrylic onhand for my laser engraver.
Hi George ... I have had good results soaking my sanding strips in warm water and dish soap. I let them soak for an hour or two, scrub with a stiff brush, rinse, then hand up to dry overnight.
Fact of life with such sanders, have found removing them and soaking in warm water for several minutes with Krud Cutter from the box store makes them like new again, of course you'll need a few on hand to keep going in the mean time.