Official Luthiers Forum!

Please forgive me if this belongs in the “off topic” forum, but I figure if there can be a thread about dust collection, this should be allowed.

Lately, YouTube has been showing me videos about making your own drum sander. It looks both simple and relatively inexpensive to do so, so I’m seriously considering taking a stab at it. One video shows the thing being powered by an electric drill, but I’m thinking a small electric motor would be a better choice.

Any experience/opinions about this? Thanks in advance.

Colleen--

Opinions are like noses; just about everybody has one, and they tend to be different. My view is that the best homemade drum sanders are pretty complicated to build, but an OK one is pretty simple. You can get a motor to drive a belt, and the belt to drive a pulley connected to a drum, easily enough. You can get a table to hinge on one end and be raised and lowered by a screw on the other end pretty easily, too. The things that are harder to do are hold down bars and a drive mechanism. You can do without those two things, but I personally think the work suffers a bit from not having those two features. The hold down bars don't matter much when you are dealing with wood that is 1/2" thick or more. But for thicknessing tops, backs and sides, you want to go down to less than a tenth of an inch for backs and sides. Those woods don't always sit perfectly flat against the bed. If there is any warping or bulging in those thin plates, that can translate into thickness irregularities if you don't have hold down bars. Regarding the drive mechanism, you can do fine without it, but it involves hand pushing and pulling the wood along the bed, or on a sled on the bed. There are some dangers and downsides to that. In the end, I know commercially made sanders are expensive, but I think you get what you pay for from either Supermax or Jet. Just my opinion.

I would like to see a DYI plan for a belt sander with dust collection.

I built one and used it for my first couple of scratch builds. Drum, pulley, electric motor, table on a hinge raised by a threaded rod, much as Don describes. It worked fine and I still use it, but I did score a nice 24" double drum grizzly sander local very reasonably priced.

The lack of a power feed was the biggest draw back on my home built one.

One can be built quite inexpensively depending on your DIY skills and scrounging abilities.
It's not so complicated that it becomes a giant time-suck project, either.

Being cheap/frugal, I always entertain the idea of making my own tools/machines - hey, I build my own guitars too - but I do ask myself, do I want to spend time and effort building a tool to do a job, or spend that time and effort DOING the job in question.

Buy once, cry once, somebody once told me.

For mine, I made a hood that covers the sanding drum, and attached a hose fitting for my dust collector. Simple as can be and fairly effective.

I didn't work from plans, the machine is simple enough and I was using repurposed materials that might not have been the same as whoever drew the plans.

I built one a couple of decades ago much like Don described above. I started with a 1/2 horse motor and upgraded to a 1 horse when a friend gave me one. It did the job, but it didn’t have a feed mechanism. That added danger and made consistent results elusive. At that point, after quite a few guitars, I knew I was committed and bought a Delta 18/36. It was worth the money. The only thing I miss from the self-built one was the ability to easily thickness pegheads. So, my nose says that if you need enough to build one, you need it enough to go ahead and buy the nice one.

I have a popup tent trailer I’m hardly using (once in the last 4 years). It’s 5 years old and in pretty good shape, and has amenities like a furnace and heated mattresses. Thinking I might be able to get enough for it to afford a decent drum sander…

A number of people have built home made drum sanders so it is quite possible to do. Some were as good as the commercial sanders and some are very basic machines that require careful operation.
I cobble together simple tools all the time but my suggestion would be to thickness your first few instruments using hand tools, all the while keeping your eye out for a good deal on a used commercial sander. People are still buying 16-32 sanders for less than $500 on the used market.
If you don't find one after you have completed your third guitar, then consider building a sander.

Figure out a way to get a small used one. Once you use a drum sander you'll realize it' an essential tool. Don't forget to check, FB marketplace, Craigslist and Ebay. I just bought a Jet spindle sander for $250 on Ebay it was in perfect shape.

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I made one similar to this. I made mine wider.
https://woodgears.ca/sander/plans/index.html

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Jason Moe
LaCrosse WI 54601

Just bought myself a used Craftex CX509N 18” drum sander, 5 years old, $1,000. I pick it up tomorrow.

I built one, with good dust extraction, and it did kind of work. But everything Don says is true.

Having decided I would be making quite a few guitars I bought a commercial one and have been absolutely pleased I did. It is so useful for loads of thicknessing tasks apart from plates.

It was a big purchase but no regrets at all.

Cheers Dave

Hope you enjoy the new sander.


Steve

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"