What You Can Do On a Drum Sander

Question I get pretty often is, how can a surface or a drum sander fit into my shop? Sander versus planer, what's the deal? I love having a surface sander. And honestly, every stick of wood I use in a project goes through the sander before I incorporate it into the project. So, let's talk about drum sanders and what's going on. What we've got is a sanding head, similar to a planer head, sanding head above the work, conveyor below. The conveyor is what's gonna feed your material past this head, under the head. Now, right now I've got on here, a pretty aggressive piece of sandpaper that's 36 grit. One of the things we can do with a sander is what's called abrasive planing. I'm gonna show you that in just a second. So, with an aggressive grit like this, we can get some of the benefit we would get from a planer, which is rapid stock removal. In the course of events here over the next little bit, I'm gonna show you that, plus the ability to sand metal, sand really thin material. Lot of other applications you can use a sander like this for. So. let's start with, just to give you a feel for what's going on here, what it looks like to do that abrasive planing. We've got two switches on it. One switch is gonna turn on and off the sanding head itself. The other is gonna control the conveyor from a very slow rate of feed, that would give me my optimal surface finish, to a faster rate of feed, which of course, propels the material through more quickly. Really cool thing about this sander, it's got a feature called INTELLISAND. And what that does is, if I inadvertently overload it, if I try to take too much off in one pass, it's gonna automatically sense that and slow down the conveyor. So, that function is, taking too much off, my depth to cut isn't right, and/or feeding at too quick a rate, too fast a rate. So with INTELLISAND, it'll automatically engage, it'll automatically kick in, and it'll slow the conveyor down for you so that you don't burn your material is the most common by-product of trying to feed too fast. 36 grit. Big chunk of funky-looking maple. So let's do a little abrasive planing. Holy buckets, what a difference. It's a pretty chunk of wood. 36 grit, abrasive planing, taking material off pretty fast with that aggressive sandpaper on there. Then of course, what we would do is go to finer and finer grits to get this to the point where we're done with it, where we're ready for it in the project. What I'm gonna do is change sandpaper, and then we'll have a look at some other cool stuff you can do with a drum sander. If you've ever made an end grain cutting board, especially harder woods, which you should be using for a cutting board, maple and cherry in this case, you know that dealing with the end grain part can be a pain. Dealing with meaning, after that stage in the glue up, you gotta get all of this leveled out, get the excess glue off of there. And it being end grain, that's a hard surface. A drum sander is a really, really great way to do this. I've got 80 grit on here right now, and in just a few passes, it's gonna have this leveled out, and then of course I can move up to finer and finer grits to eliminate sanding marks, leave very little sanding that needs to be done with a random orbit sander. Drum sander versus planer. This is a great application for a sander. You really shouldn't plane end grain cutting boards because a planer knife, a planer head can grab the end grain and throw chunks back. So it can turn into a very unsafe scenario pretty quickly. Drum sanders are really, really the best choice for dealing with end grain cutting board. Now, what about really thin stuff? This is down to less than an 1/8 of an inch. If you've tried to do thin stuff on your planer, you probably already know what often happens there. On a planer, what happens is, the planer head has a tendency to lift really thin material, pull it up into the planer head, and basically destroy it. This is another great benefit of a drum sander is, we can easily handle this thin stuff. This is a piece of flame birch on a sander. You need to write a letter home, we can basically make wood paper on the drum sander. That is incredibly thin. It's cool if you need to do bent laminations, this is a great way to finalize the thickness on those laminations. Get really, really thin pieces you can put into your forms. When I'm making, I dunno, face frames are a great example, anything where I've ripped a bunch of parts to width, now I've got saw marks on there. This is a great way to deal with those saw marks. And again, it's part of what I'm trying to do is make my life easier, and do less sanding with a random orbit sander. The other thing with a handheld sander is, if I try to sand these edges, I might round 'em over. With a drum sander, we can send all of these through on edge like this. It's gonna keep those edges nice and crisp, it's gonna keep the width uniform, and it's gonna really easily get rid of those saw marks. A lovely little before and after, even with 80 grit on there, which is fairly aggressive. That's the edge I just sanded, this is what I started with. See all the saw marks in there from the table saw? So, cleaning up edges like that, it's a great thing to do on the sander. Now, let's go in a different direction. That's a piece of aluminum. One of the things we can do with a drum sander is create, we can emulate a brushed finish. We're not actually gonna get a brushed finish outta this, we're gonna get a sanded finish outta this, but I'll show you what I mean. So, just have a look at that face and what it looks like now. Now, I took the dust collection hose off, and I sand non-ferrous metals on my sander all the time, but I don't wanna take a chance of any of those hot particulates finding their way into the dust collector. So taking the hose completely off is a good way to make sure that's not gonna happen. Little brushed aluminum action going there. Now, you're gonna get some heat. So, it's quite possible, you need to sand a little bit, stop, sand a little bit, cool that piece down in order to be able to work with it. But pretty neat trick you can do with a drum sander in order to give non-ferrous metal that brushed look. Now, there's a cool benefit of an open-ended drum sander. That piece is obviously a lot wider than the sanding head is long. So the way this works is that on this machine, there's a lever up here on front. And with this lever, when I put it in a down position, what it does is it actually raises this side of the conveyor just a tiny bit, a couple of thousands of an inch. And what we're after here, what we're avoiding is the opportunity for the sanding drum to leave a ridge in the middle of the board. So when I do this, very simple, it raises this side so we're just a tiny, tiny bit out of parallel. And then of course, when I put that back down, now we're back into parallel. That feature is what then allows me to double pass wide stuff like this. This is a 19 inch head, so I could be sanding stuff as wide as 38 inches by doing it in that double pass approach. Really cool aspect of a sander like this. So overall, when I said earlier, every piece of wood I touch in my shop goes through my sander, that's true. And I really, really like the dust collection because it grabs it right here at the source. I also like that, it really reduces the time I spend later working with a random orbit sander to get these ready for finish, get my parts ready for finish. Plus, that ability to do weird stuff. Non-ferrous metal, the end grain cutting boards. If you had an application where you needed to surface down man-made material for some reason, like a plywood or particle board or something like that, you could do that on a sander. That's not work you can do on a planer. So overall, very, very versatile tools that really add a lot to a shop.