How to Clean Sanding Belts

If you own a drum sander, a surface sander, I'm sure that you're already aware that the abrasive that goes on in these machines is not inexpensive and there's a labor expense. We've got to get it cut to the right size, get it carefully wrapped on the head. So bottom line, we want to make sure we get as much mileage out of this as we can. So I've been asked a bunch of times, how do you clean that? How do you get more mileage out of the abrasive? And the answer is with an abrasive cleaning stick, and there's some technique here. The abrasive cleaning sticks like this are available from woodworking retailers. They're available online. The bottom line is this is a crepe bar. And when the abrasive is running, whether it's a belt sander, or a drum sander, whatever you're using, you can run this over it. And it does a great job of getting the junk out of there. Now, the key is that you need to do this frequently. So I'm going to guess that here, and here, where that's already so built up, that may not clean, because somebody may have waited a little bit too long. But you'll see in the center here, what a great job it does. What happens is that if you wait too long, the sap in the wood, the resins in the wood will also get into the abrasive, and as everything heats up from friction, that will melt. And this isn't going to clean melted sap out of your abrasive. So let me show you what this looks like and what a great job it does. That's a pretty good before and after. It really got a lot of junk out of there. I use this all the time, not just on my drum sander, but really on every sander I have in the shop. Now, again, out here where I waited too long, there's just really no good way to clean that. The other thing laying here is, if you're abrasive cleaning stick, as you use it, cause progressively shorter and shorter, or if you're just not comfortable getting this close to that sanding drum, this provides another approach. All I did to make this a magic wand of sandpaper cleaning is use epoxy, two part epoxy. And I glued that little chunk of cleaning stick to this long one by two, so that I can get back here and have a little more control over what I'm doing. So net-net, take care of that abrasive and it will take care of you. This is something where you can't do this too often, but you can do it too infrequently. This and a little bit of material we lost there, is way less expensive than replacing this. So abrasive cleaning stick, good answer to keeping that sandpaper nice and clean.