The Super Max 16-32 Surface Sander

To be honest, I have had a love affair with surface sanders or drum sanders for a really long time, all the way back to when I was a production manager of a big cabinet shop. We had a drum sander in there that we used the heck out of. And in this case, what's happened is SuperMax has made a product, their 16-32 Sander, that's just a really cool product, and that's what I want to talk about. I just want to show you some of the cool stuff that SuperMax did with this. So first off, what's the deal with a drum sander? Part of the reason I like this is labor savings. Another reason I like it is sawdust saving. So labor saving. In my shop, everything I build gets sent through a sander before I assemble. And what I find is that, as a result, I spend way less time after assembly using a random orbit sander to clean things up and get 'em smooth and get 'em nice and get 'em ready for finish. So there's that. The other thing I like about these a lot is that the dust collection is so good. So here, everything is centralized. The sanding dust that I'm creating is shooting up that pipe going into my dust collector and just makes things easier on my lungs. Now this machine, in particular, 16-32, what's that all about? The sanding head is 16 inches wide. However, because it's open on that side, you can sand stuff up to 32 inches wide, twice as big as the head, and I'm gonna show you what that's all about in just a little bit. Now, why am I so in love with this machine? Well, let me show you a couple things. One of the things with surface sanders, very common, is that, like a planer, there's some kind of a hand wheel that allows me to raise and lower the head. and very commonly it's 1/16 of an inch per revolution. That works great. However, if you're going from the zero point, if you just sanded something paper thin, and you're going up to the max, now we're sanding something really, really thick, this is a lot of cranks. So one of the things that SuperMax did to overcome this is put a rapid change on the machine, and that's what this lever is all about. So, I can do gross adjustments with the lever, get it close, disable the lever and go back to the hand crank to get my finite setting. So that's really cool. Good time saving, good elbow saving. I'm not having to turn this quite so much. The other thing I really like is that they've included a digital readout. And one of the things that's smart about this is, sometimes, you'll see a digital readout that only reads in decimals. And if you're not used to working in decimals, that can make smoke come out of your ears. In this case, it's decimals, and there's a fraction readout, as well. So as we're changing height, it's reacting, accordingly, to tell us the exact distance between the sanding drum and the conveyor. So great way to really introduce some finite measurement into the sanding that you're doing. Now, on the conveyor is variable speed, and that's what this dial here is all about. So the numbers represent percentage of feed rate, 10%, 20%, 30%, 100%. So this is kind of like a dimmer switch, and that allows you to control the rate of feed, which allows you to control how good a sanding job you're gonna get. But the other thing that's really cool is what they call INTELLISAND, and this is pretty darn smart. What it does is, as I'm feeding material through, if I'm taking off more material than the machine is happy with, it reads that, the light comes on, and when the light comes on, what it's doing is it's slowing down the conveyor automatically, on its own, in order to get it down to a feed rate that's a better feed rate for the machine. So bottom line with this, it's a really good way to help prevent you from burning your stock by feeding it too fast or trying to hog off more than the machine wants to take off. So that INTELLISAND is a really, really cool thing. Let's hit on this idea of we're sanding something bigger than the sanding head, like this big piece of red oak. It's wider than the machine, which isn't a deal. We can deal with that. What happens on this style of sander, when you're sanding something wider than the head, is you want to introduce just a little bit of an opening on this end. We're actually gonna take the sanding head and the conveyor ever so slightly, a few thousands of an inch, out of parallel so that the edge of the drum doesn't leave a ridge in our material. So again, somebody gave this some thought, and they made it easy. When I push down on the fast lever here, it introduces that change. So now all I have to do is machine my wood. Let's go ahead and make a pass so you can see how well this works here. I'm gonna jump down on my height, get a little closer to my work. When you're using this feature, don't change the height of the head in between passes. We just rotate this, send it again. And keep on going until we get the sanding job we want. And what's cool is, because of the way that we introduce that little bit of opening, there's no ridge left in the center of our big wide panel. The other thing I like a lot, infeed and outfeed tables are great. They do add to the footprint of the machine, so one of the smart things they did here is made it so we can do that and take 'em out of the way when you don't need 'em. So overall, I think this is just a case where SuperMax did a great job giving thought to this machine and added a lot of features to it, built in a lot of features that make it really convenient to use. Sanders are general, sanders, in general, are great to have in the shop. A sander with a lot of features is even better to have in the shop. So, nice job to SuperMax. They really got a good machine going here.