Abrasive Planing and Sanding on the SuperMax Drum Sander

I don't think there's a woodworker out there who does not wanna simplify their sanding operations. Machines like this do a really wonderful job of that. Have a look under the hood on here, and here's what I'm talking about. This is a dual drum surface sander. So what that means is that you can run one abrasive here on the front drum, another abrasive on the back. So the way you're gonna do it is coarse on the front, finer on the back. In one pass as your material goes under those heads, it's getting both a rough sanding and a cleanup sanding all in one fell swoop. So it really optimizes your time in the shop by limiting the time you're spending sanding. Now a good question to educate you on this stuff would be how do we get these drums set so that they can both do their job? Now the deal is that the drum in the back is set just a little bit below the drum in the front. So it makes sense. Material goes under this one. A little bit of wood comes off. Then it goes to the back drum. A little more wood comes off. How much is the offset? Well, when you look at the side of these machines, what we'll find right here is a chart. And that tells us based on the combination of grits, in the case we've got right here, 80 on the front, one 20 on the back, what the offset should be in thousands of an inch. The way that gets controlled is on a digital readout here. So by manipulating the hand wheel on the side of the machine, I can very easily control the offset between the two drums. The other thing we've got here is a lot of power. This is a three horse machine. So what does that mean? Well, we're gonna have a look at abrasive planning. We're gonna have a look at cleaning up end grain. We're gonna have a look at sanding highly figured woods. What that motor is gonna let us do is take a lot of material off quickly and result in a really, really good finish on the stuff that's coming out on the outfeed side. So that gives you an overview of what the machine does. Let's put this baby to work and see just how well it does work. We're gonna start with some abrasive planing, and a great question would be why would I do abrasive planning? Well, one answer to that would be if I get a planer I can plane with it, but I can't sand. If I get a sander, I can plane and sand. So here's where we're at right now. We've got a 36 grit abrasive on the front drum, an 80 grit on the back. That's gonna let me hog material off really quickly, planning. Now when you look at this particular board it's a little icky looking right now. It's a piece of reclaimed barn board. But it's gonna be really cool once we clean it up and have it come out the other side of the machine. Is there a nail in there? I don't think so, but maybe I missed one. If I send a board with some kind of a fastener in it through a planer, I've now nicked a really expensive planer knife. If I send it through my sander, maybe I have to change the sandpaper, maybe I don't. No where near the catastrophic effect. Now to get going, I've got a digital readout here and that indicates the distance between the drums and the conveyor. So it's set a thickness less than what we've got here on our material. In fact, we're set up to hog off about a 16th of an inch of wood all in one fell swoop here. So probably enough talking, let's see the results. Well, that's pretty cool. What a great piece to incorporate into a project. In fact, having just a little bit of the old wood left there is pretty cool and adds a nice detail. Now one of the things you may have noticed is that the material started and it stuttered just a little bit. And that's on purpose, that's because here on the conveyor it's set to its maximum feed rate. But the machine knows if I'm feeding it too fast and in it'll automatically slow itself down. It'll regulate itself to make sure we don't overfeed the material under the abrasives. Now let's have a look at another application for sanding so aggressively like we did here. Everybody loves end grain cutting boards. What nobody loves is the cleanup that has to be done after they're glued up. So end grain cutting board, this is end grain standing up this way. Lots of glue still left behind. I didn't scrape this thing at all. Then additionally, there's some black in here where the glue released the color from the clamps, and that black is embedded into the wood. So let's send this one through same grit, and see what kind of contrast we can get. I'm gonna do this one just a little bit differently. I'm gonna get up higher than the material. So obviously it goes under there, and right now nothing's happening. And then as it starts to feed, I'm gonna find the correct setting. You'll see it happen in just a second. So how long would that take you with a handheld sander? Now of course I'd go to finer and finer paper in order to finalize this. We can look at the back, look at the front. Get some idea there of just how quickly abrasive planning can work on that end grain. Lots more I wanna show you here yet. We're gonna do an abrasive change, then come back and look at some highly figured wood. Not my figure, the wood's figure. What a difference a little work with an abrasive makes. The board when I started with it was just full of chips left behind by a plainer. But now having gone through the sander look at how smooth that is, and we can really see the birdseye in this birdseye maple. Now just to make that pop a little bit more, let me grab a little linseed oil. 'Cause if we dampen that with just a little bit of finish, it's really gonna start to look cool. Yeah, see that kind of effervescence it has? It starts to get real three-dimensional. So another great benefit to sanding instead of planing is the ability to work with highly figured woods like this. Now a couple of other things cooking here as far as feeding here on the conveyor belt. Remember that with sanders, you can get really, really, really, thin almost paper thin, something you can't do with a plainer. We can also get pretty tall. We have a six-inch capacity on this particular machine. Now one way to think of that is six-inch thickness. But imagine you make something like a big drawer and you wanna get the front and the back and the sides all perfectly level before you install the drawer. Up to six inches, that whole drawer box could feed through just like this and get cleaned up. Now we've talked about surface sanding here. This machine will also do edge sanding which is a pretty cool way to clean up edges on highly figured wood like this. Next thing I wanna show you. We've sent a lot of stuff through this machine as a thickness sander. One of the other things it's capable of is doing edge sanding. So there's a small change that I've made up here on top of the machine. This plate previously was down here, flat across the top. Now it's standing up on edge similar to a jointer fence. But remember we're abrasive, not jointing. Well, I hope I'm not being abrasive. The machine is being abrasive. So another great application here. We've got our birdseye maple. If we run this edge on a joiner, there's some chance it's gonna chip out on us. Here on the sander we can clean it up without any chipping at all. So that's a cool feature, nice way to clean up that edge. Now what about applications where you wanna clean up end grain? You do a cut on a table saw or a miter saw and you wanna get the saw marks out of that. This is another spot where we could run that end grain across the abrasive. Can't do that on a jointer. Additionally, something I've run into before is I do a frame and panel door glue up across the bottom or the top, or both. The rails and the styles aren't in perfect alignment. So here's a way that we could send that across the top of the sanding drum, clean that up, get out any saw marks, and flush up the components. So lots of stuff we've talked about here. We're looking at a category of machines that has power, has the ability to do abrasive planing. With the dual drums in there, we're getting twofer because we can do that rougher sanding on the front, finer sanding on the back saving you time. So a machine like this is gonna let you do more woodworking, less sanding. And of course the woodworking part is the really fun part of the shop. This makes sanding though a little bit fun too because it makes it so easy to do. So check them out, definitely worth a look.