Performax 16/32 Drum Sander
For some time I’ve toyed with the idea of getting a drum sander. I finally did and this article describes my initial experiences. In a couple of weeks I’ll be able to show the results of the project that prompted this purchase.
Drum sanders are handy for many things but in a crowded workshop can one be justified? The most often quoted benefit is the ability to dimension wood with cranky grain that gets torn up in a thicknesser. My thicknesser is quite gentle and with sharp blades and a modest cut has managed almost all woods I’ve tried. And there is always hand planing. A well tuned plane with a sharp blade should see you through any wood.
So a couple of weeks ago I started a project (which is still under embargo) that uses highly fiddlebacked blackwood. I was apprehensive about putting the boards over my rather clunky old Aussie jointer even with newly sharpened blades. But I found that setting a fine depth of cut and feeding them very slowly worked well. My thicknesser is a light-weight 10″ Scheppach which usually handles delicate cuts with ease so I was less worried by the thicknessing process and indeed the first few boards milled beautifully.
However as I moved to the more figured boards (the ones I actually wanted to use) I found that my expectations were arse-about. The jointer handled them ok because I could control the feed rate appropriately. But the thicknesser has a constant feed rate and no matter how shallow a cut I took the tear out was awesome - anything up to 3mm deep tear!
So hand planing was the answer. I successfully dimensioned the two long sides of my box by hand but when I got to the short sides the amount of bend, cupping and wind in the wood meant that I had to remove large amounts of material (just as my No. 6 Stanley entered a cranky phase). I reconsidered the drum sander.
After a bit of net research I decided on the Performax 16/32. It would be my first purchase of an American-designed machine (for woodwork at least). Most of my machinery is traditional heavy rigid gear like an old Italian bandsaw, the aforementioned jointer, an old chisel mortiser and two nice Wadkin machines. But then again drum sanders are a newish concept especially at the consumer level.
I found Gary Pye Woodturning to be the best price in Australia and they had the stock so I had my machine 3 working days later.
I probably took 4 hours from the pallet being dropped in my driveway to having the machine tuned and tested.
My first impression came from assembling the stand. I’ve done this for a few low-end (ie Taiwanese-made) tools such as my router table and expected a few rough edges and some tweaking to get all the bolt holes aligned. Not so! The stand was well manufactured with accurate angles and drillings and nicely finished edges. The castors were robust with good locking (and unlocking) mechanisms.
The drum sander was heavier than I expected (always good!) and went together quite easily.
I had read in various fora when doing my research about people struggling with adjusting the tracking of the conveyor belt as well as the drum alignment. The tracking in fact has a huge tolerance and mine would probably been ok from the box had I not fiddled with it. (In my view it always pays to adjust these things even if they are already close because eventually you need to know how to adjust them and what they do when they are out of adjustment.) The only reason to fine tune the tracking as far as I can see is for when you are sanding extremely thin sections. In this case (below 0.8mm thickness) the drum belt touches the conveyor belt if it is not very tight - and even then this will still happen if you go very thin.
The drum alignment requires a tad more effort. This has two aspects. My interest is in making sure the faces are parallel, ie the outside edge is not wider than the inside edge. Using the open-ended drum to thickness wider boards is the other interest. I’ve not needed to do this yet so I haven’t investigated tuning for this. Making the cut parallel is just a case of following the instructions but the adjustment is a little coarse and I haven’t got it spot on yet (but within 0.2mm).
I found that the sander dimensioned my difficult wood very handsomely and it took me only an hour and a half to complete the preparation of my pieces for dovetailing. This compares to probably 5 hours or more if I had hand planed and the accuracy was better!
Other features I’ve found useful in the first week include:
- the ability to dimension short lengths (such as some 10mm wide ebony that I need to thickness to 0.9mm which are in lengths of around 6 inches)
- quickly cleaning up veneers that have been resawn from solid stock (often rather than letting it all to up the thicknesser’s extractor) and being able to accurately dimension them as well to as little as 0.4mm!
- roughly dress large slabs (just did one that was 15in x 3in x 6ft) so you can get a good look at the grain and figure before deciding how to break it up
- thickness strips of wood thin enough to weave them into a screen!
2 comments June 17th, 2007
