John,
I built one of these a while back. I guess I have mixed feelings about how it came out. Knowing what I know now, I would try to find a used thickness sander on Craigslist or the like. The design is pretty sound but you have to really pay attention to the details to get it to be accurate enough to work correctly. The caveat to all this is that at the time that I built this my woodworking skills were still pretty weak which didn't help. If you do decide to build it spend a lot of time going through the design before you do anything. Understand how it all works before you get going so you understand what has to be done precisely and what doesn't. Here are some comments on my experience:
1. The table design is pretty finicky. The rollers they use are shop built out of PVC and the tracking system for the belt is somewhat of a bear to get to work right. You really have to get the rollers true (or better yet, find a production roller that you can use like an old conveyor roller or something), and everything has to be square to make the tracking work. I never did get it to work right (the belt would eventually loose tracking and bind) and trashed it and went to a flat table with no belt feed on a piano hinge design (pretty common on most of the other shop built sanders).
2. The table height adjustment allows for sanding a large range of thicknesses. If you are building this primarily for guitar building I would set it up for the thicknesses that you will be doing. You can reduce the height of the overall design making it much more rigid. Again, by allowing all that adjustment, you have to get all those holes aligned just right to keep the table and the drum parallel to each other. There is no means of easily adjusting the parallelism of the table to the drum. Again, I ended up trashing the adjustable table height and going with the table fixed on one end with a piano hinge and a simple threaded adjustment on the other end. This limits the thickness of material I can process to about 3/4" max. but I use mine primarily for top, back and side thicknessing so its not an issue for me.
3. While using power take off from the table saw works fine, I have a router table on my table saw which makes using the sander somewhat awkward as I have to reach over the table to feed the stock. Just something to think about.
So, for myself, between the time spent getting the materials, building it, tearing it apart and rebuilding it, if I had to do it again, I would buy a commercially built one.
YMMV but I hope this provides some insights based on my experience.
Ron
|
and if so do you fasten the workpiece to the table? (ya know, like with double sided tape)