Delta drum sander in feed/ out feed bars
WebbReynolds
| Posted in General Discussion on
Hello,
I am in the process of going through a delta 18/36 drum sander that I recently purchased. I was heating a piece of wood through the sander, without any sandpaper on, and with the lid up, so I could see the rollers. I noticed that the rear outfeed rollers were not engaging the piece of wood. The infield rollers worked just fine. My question is, is it supposed to be this way, or does there need to be some kind of adjustment so the outfield rollers engage the wood after it passes the drum? Thanks
Replies
Both sets of rollers need to apply some pressure downward, to keep the wood flat against the bed. Too much pressure, the wood won't feed. Too little on the outfeed side and the wood will chatter. Too little pressure on the indeed side and the drums will throw the workpiece, at high velocity, straight back into your crotch.
Thanks. Definitely don’t want kickback. It doesn’t look like the bars are adjustable, but I’ll have to see.
I have that same machine. Most problems are caused by trying to sand too deeply on a single pass, however ,there is no adjustment on the pressure rollers, there is just the springs. The rear roller in it's down position is set to be at the bottom of the diameter of the drum. The front roller can drop much lower. There are many design faults with this Delta machine and this is one of them. You pass a board through the sander and then try and feed it through again or another board. The roller has dropped enough that the flat end of the board hits head on into the roller and will not permit the roller to turn and thereby you can't get the board to feed. Sometimes you can lift the backend of the board and get it below the midpoint of the roller. I will sometimes put a chamfer on the leading top end of the board so that the board can start below that mid point and lift the roller. If you butt sand boards end to end that solves the problem as well and I will make a board that can travel behind the board I'm sanding. If you start the next board before the roller can drop it solves the problem.
As to your problem with the board not conveying through I would suspect that you are sanding too deep as the most likely problem if the board stops but the conveyor is still moving. These things do not take a very big bite,and can seem tediously slow. Lots of very small passes. To start I drop the table until the board easily passes through then crank it up until it just touches- from then on its just a bump on the handle each pass. If the conveyor stops you need to adjust by tighting or maybe the conveyor belt is just done. The tracking for the conveyor is notoriously finicky at best and just plain bad in my opinion. I dont think ive ever gotten it dialed in to my satisfaction. Get a long allen wrench because you will fiddle with the thing constantly and you'll see why you want a lot of length on the wrench when you do get into it. Feed rate has to do with the grit your using and the material your sanding and that's a learning curve that you will acquire. Do not try to run very short stock through this thing. It can lift and jam and if it stops the drum you'll fry a
drive belt in the wink of an eye!
There are no, and I mean none, manufacturer replacement parts for these! Sandpaper and conveyors belts are easy to find aftermarket. I have found a place that has or can make drive belts and they specialize in obsolete belts called West Coast Belts. If you machine is old ,which it is ,expect to need new rubber sometime soon. Bearings are bearings, they exist somewhere. Other parts will be difficult to acquire. If you don't have a manual, get one. It will explain adjustments. They're available online. By the way,I have made every mistake and have had every problem imaginable with this machine but I have never experienced kickback. This Delta machine is far from perfect but I figure better to have a drum sander then not have one!
I know nothing about the Delta, but it seems really crappy if the rollers can't be adjusted. I have a Jet, and can adjust the pressure rollers up or down.
But this is a Delta, the op wants to know about the Delta.
The roller does its job and I guess you could call it "self adjusting". It holds the wood down just fine. But yah, they kind of blew it. To my thinking a simple solution would have been to have a larger diameter front roller then it would work much better. As designed being able to adjust the rollers yourself wouldn't make much difference on this machine. The problem is just an annoyance. Once you figure out the get a round it sands stuff !
Jet sander design is a crappy version of a Performax like their other machines are a crappy version of Powermatic which are all owned by the same people. They had the benefit of Performax's design-- they owned it. But at a price point when these Deltas were made they were about half the price of a Performax. These came out a little bit after Rockwell spun off Delta and Porter Cable to go build Spaceshuttles. So a buyer purchasing this machine would be thinking old Delta quality but it was a whole new company. It took a few years but the new owners were able to take what was probably the country's most successful tool manufacturer into non existence!
The Jet is certainly a Performax, who they bought and rebranded, but there is nothing crappy about it. I can sand 6 inch parts as thin as .055" all day long. The only faults are those endemic to all drumsanders -- mostly burn marks on the paper from pitch in the wood.
But not being able to adjust the rollers, and needing to put a chamfer on the leading edge of boards to make it feed? That sounds like the very definition of crappy.
Well actually it's a German holding co. that bought Powermatic ,Jet, Performax and some other companies all within short order of each other. Then moved all production to Asia. The Delta I don't believe was still being produced into this century -back when Jet was still being painted blue and was considered just a cut above a Grizzly which were pretty crude nasty machines when they first showed up, but inexpensive, as were Jets at the time. Mine is a type 1 was made in America. So the first version of this machine, there were two more versions ,i dont know if they corrected some of the problems or not on their type 2 or 3 but Delta also moved their production to Asia. I don't think that there were more than about 2 choices when these first came out and the Delta was fully half the price of a Performax. Both were pretty exotic machines at the time. These open sided sanders required dust collection and prior to the 1980s dust collection in a small production shop was a broom!
The op probably got this thing pretty cheap. I wouldn't pay more than maybe $500 for a used one today and then only if it came with about $500 worth of sandpaper! They do quite a decent job of sanding, can sand thin stock and ,by the way ,on thin stock the problem of getting caught on the roller doesn't happen. He will get a lot of use out of what he has, crummy or not!