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Sander looks nice and yes, roofing is messy - especially with asphalt shingles.


Steve

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Congratulations! I think the drum sander is a "must-have" for making guitars. When I started on guitars after decades of woodworking, that was the only tool I felt I had to buy in order to be successful... other than the plethora of fretting tool nonsense :-/

Today was making bindings day. Carefully re-sawn from a 3”x2”x3’ piece of curly maple. There are still 3 strips that haven’t gone through the drum sander yet. Hopefully I cut them in the right orientation to show the curly grain. One afternoon’s work = enough binding for 2 guitars, I think. Or at least to have some in reserve in case I break one or two bending them.

I remember when a graduate of one of the lutherie schools came by for some help removing a lifting bridge. He looked around my shop and asked where the sander was. I told him I didn't have one, and he asked: "How can you make guitars without a drum sander?" I asked back: "How did Torres make guitars without a drum sander?", and got no answer.

It sure comes in handy, though…

I’ve built several without a drum sander and it wasn’t terrible but I like having the sander better


Steve

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Today was side thicknessing day. I have to say, even with the drum sander, getting the sides down to about 2mm took a LONG time. Probably due at least in part to the number of times I stopped to check the thickness with my digital caliper, especially near the end. Sure glad I bought that drum sander!

The pieces in the foreground show how thick the wood was when I started...

What grits are you using Colleen? I like to use 60 or 80 grit then then one last wrap at 120 grit before final thicknessing with a scraper and or finish sander.

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Funny, I never thought about that. I really am green with this. I’ve only changed the roll once, I’m pretty sure I put 120 on it. I should’ve been using 80 grit to start. I’ll know better next time.

I use 80grit on my drum sander. It’s still slow. After thicknessing I use an ROS to sand to p220 before I start bending and assembly


Steve

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

When I first had a drum sander, I used 80 grit to get down to thickness quickly. But, I found the canyons made by 80 were very hard to sand out. So, I start with 100 and just have a bit more patience. After that, I sand with 220 on the ROS to remove the scratches from the drum sander.

I think someone here once recommended that, after you run your wood through your thickness sander at any particular grit, you should start the random orbital sanding at a rougher grit in order to get rid of the straight sanding scratches from the drum sander. It has worked out well for me. Also, if I have time, I like to do the bulk of the thickness removal with 80 grit paper on the drum sander, then switch to 120 grit on the drum sander. That helps minimize the depth of the straight line scratches. From there, ROS with 80 grit (per the prior advice), then up through the grits.

I guess I could expand a bit so there's no confusion. I'm using a Jet 10-20 so even with 80 grit I have to go pretty slow. When I finish thicknessing I run the wood through the drum sander several extra times without changing the height adjustment; I've found that this reduces the depth of the sanding scratches. After I move to the ROS I go from P120 to P180 and then to P220 which goes fairly fast. I have a good downdraft table and it's real easy to swap grits out on the ROS so it's convenient for me. Anyway, I hate switching paper on the drum sander. If I had a larger sander I might do it differently. I'm sure everyone uses a slightly different method but as long as you end up where you need to be I guess it's all good.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

Judging from the strips, that's a lot to ask your sander to do. What were they, close to .2"? You may want to use other tools until you are within ten thou or so. Lots of YouTubes out there on thickenessing thin stock with a sled on your planer or using a scrub plane and a little elbow grease.

Yes, a lot of side material comes at .160 or more. It's good to find a way to hog off most of that. I always thought it was such a waste when people cut it that thick. I have some Brazilian that is .200!

Pat

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Pat

I don't have a sander, so it is just planes and scrapers. I did go the the mil!works one day for resawing, and brought some joined tops for thicknessing. They only go down to 1/8" but at least. they are flat and parallel already. I have some Padauk sides do do, and one side of them is gnarly. I renewed them by hand, and wasn't paying attention.

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Why be normal?

Cutting thick can make a of of sense. These hard woods can wear blades pretty quickly, and I've had instances of a newly sharpened bandsaw starting to wander by the end of a cut in really hard woods, such as Osage. It's better to get three pieces that are thick enough to use than four that are too thin.

I never had a sander, and use a drill press planer for much of my thicknessing. You can remove as much as 1/3 of the wood in pass, and it actually makes pretty quick work of thick stock like that. I'll take things to about .2mm (.008") over thickness and go to a light hand planing and then scrape. the DPP also makes chips rather than dust, which is nice.

Do you mean a Safe-T-Planer? I was always told not to exceed 50% of the cutter. Taking a pass on both sides would leave a massive area in the middle of an 8-1/2 to 9” board untouched.

I’m curious how you deal with that?


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I have had a lot of success with this approach as well. I have a set of dining chairs I'm working on with shop sawn veneers for bent laminations for the chair backs/seats. I use Klingspor p100 on my Supermax 16/32 and run each board through an extra 3 times once I'm happy with the thickness. I don't even need to use an ROS after that for the layers that will be sandwiched in the middle to get a good gluing surface before it all goes in the vacuum bag. I'm still working on my first guitar, but I used the same approach for my shop sawn sides, binding, and purfling and and am very happy with the results.

rlrhet asked:
"Do you mean a Safe-T-Planer? "
Yes.
"I was always told not to exceed 50% of the cutter."
Right. I should have said that you can take off up to 1/3 of the thickness in one pass, but not to exceed 1/2 the cutter depth. I've taken wood down to .5mm when everything is working right, but that last cuts have to be very shallow.

You can work your way into the middle of a wide board by taking passes that are half as wide as the diameter of the cutter head. How wide the board can be depends on the reach of your drill press. A friend once suggested removing the head from a bench top drill press and screwing the base to the ceiling with the column over a bench. Then you put the head back on the column pointing down. We were discussing how to get in to the center of an upright bass top or back to rough in the contours.

Al Carruth wrote:
"You can work your way into the middle of a wide board by taking passes that are half as wide as the diameter of the cutter head. How wide the board can be depends on the reach of your drill press. A friend once suggested removing the head from a bench top drill press and screwing the base to the ceiling with the column over a bench. Then you put the head back on the column pointing down. We were discussing how to get in to the center of an upright bass top or back to rough in the contours."

A radial drill press might be a lot less trouble.

If you are looking to save a buck, checkout facebook market place. Lots of rigid spindle sanders for sale in my area.

Regarding thickness in a wide board with a Safe-T planer:
In a traditional drill press you are limited by the fact that the post supporting the drill is a fixed distance away from the chuck. You can get around this by using a portable (“hand-held”) drill mounted on a sturdy beam and suspended over a flat table top. Imagine a table that has a 4x2 or similar beam suspended, horizontal, above it - supported by a house brick on either side of the table and clamped in place. In the middle of the beam you securely attach a hand drill (my jig used a metal plate and some bolts to hold it). The drill is pointing down towards the table so that when you put the Safe-T planer in the chuck its head is parallel to the table surface. You set the gap between the table surface and the planer head to determine the thickness of the timber that you are processing. A simple way to do this is to set it directly at the chuck. With the drill turned off, put a sample piece of desired thickness (e.g. 3mm) on the table surface under the drill, place the planer head in the chuck and let it sit on that 3mm spacer, tighten the chuck, and then slide the spacer out. Hey presto, you now have a cutter head set 3mm above and parallel to the table top. Turn on the drill and push your work piece through, cutting it in strips, like mowing the lawn. But it will throw those chips all around the workshop.

I used to use this method for thicknessing guitar plates until I got a drum sander. It worked pretty well to get them close to final thickness and then finish the job with a scraper or ROS. I have to admit that the drum sander is a quicker and less messy tool for the job.

Mark Mc wrote:
"In a traditional drill press you are limited by the fact that the post supporting the drill is a fixed distance away from the chuck. "

That's what I meant by the 'reach' of the drill press. If it's eight inched from the post supporting the head to center of the chuck, you can reach the center of a 16" wide board with a little to spare. Since few guitars are much wider than 16" and you can get closer if the plate is already cut to outline by going in from the waist, a DP with an 8" reach is usually good enough.

Clay S. wrote:
"A radial drill press might be a lot less trouble."

When I worked in a machine shop, running drill presses, we had a 'radial' machine. It had, iirc, six spindles that could be set up with different drills/reamers/tappers and you could cycle from one to the next. This head was still out on the end of an arm with a limited reach to the post, so it would not have helped in using the drill press planer on a wide board. Perhaps there's another sort of 'radial' drill press?

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