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A couple years ago I decided to make a wine rack for my wife and bought a circle cutter to do the job.



Naturally, having strong packrat genes I kept all the cutouts and thought of different uses for them. Initially I'd considered spool clamps but the bigger cutouts didn't seem very practical.



It wasn't until recently that I realized that I had the building blocks (well, actually disks) for a DIY drum sander.



I don't want to make anything overly complicated. In fact, my main goal is to have something that will be sufficient to do unjoined plates and side slats using a hand drill to power it.

Make sure everything is stiff enough so it doesn't flex appreciably.

I saw this the other day on the Instructables.com webpage.....https://www.instructables.com/id/Homema ... dium=email.

MaineGeezer wrote:Make sure everything is stiff enough so it doesn't flex appreciably.

I’m thinking of just making the drum 8”-10” wide using a 5/16” threaded rod with bearings taken from a fidget spinner of all things. I’m also going to use an old hand drill to power it. My goal is to use it to sand the sides and unjointed spruce plates. This is a poor man’s experiment to get things in the “ball park” so that I can use hand tools to fine tune only.

I just finished making a thicknessing sander based on this design:

https://woodgears.ca/sander/thickness.html

The only differences between these plans:

https://woodgears.ca/sander/plans/index.html

and mine are:

1. Instead of making the pulley that goes onto the drum shaft, I bought one already made from a pulley supply company that had the 1" hole for the hub.


2. I didn't use the base. Instead, I was gifted with another one that already had wheels and stuff, so I used that.

3. In my sander, the switch goes to a two-outlet junction box. The first outlet is for the sander motor, and the second one is for the dust collector, so I can switch them on at the same time.

One more thing:

I found this thread on the "Official Luthiers Forum" to be invaluable:

http://www.luthiersforum.com/forum/view ... 01&t=31794

If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask!

A drill may not have enough oomph or high enough RPM to drive it.

I've decided to make something a little more robust:



the center axle is now a 1/2" diameter x 24" long stainless steel rod. I was concerned about using solid wood cutouts as the body of the drum so I tried switching to plywood and PVC cutouts as pictured here. I'm going to try using a PVC tube as the outer body of the drum. Here is it mocked up.

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As for powering it, I need to find a 1 HP motor somewhere. The drill is just for testing. The best price I've found is $170 from Harbor Freight.

Admire your efforts here, for me part of the fun of guitar building has been making different guitar specific tools to help make better guitars with less mind numbing work. Sometime one ends up spending more money and taking longer to do this, but what do you know until you try it.
Was going to build a sander but just about the time I started I was asked to do an unsolicited remodeling job that paid more then enough to buy a Jet 16-32 drum sander that just happened to be on a big sale, oh lucky me. One of the coolest/best tools I've ever bought, like a planer it's a huge step up to better woodworking/guitar building.
Will follow your sander build hoping it makes your guitar building life much easier and the building of doesn't cause too much stress.

Bruce,

I went the route of using a pvc pipe as you are doing. I was surprised to find that most all of the 4" pvc pipe available is "foamcore" and not a solid pvc core. On the foam core the wall thickness of actual pvc is quite thin, making it tough to have enough stock to true it up. I suppose I could have gone to a plumbing supply house instead of the big box stores to find what I wanted and needed.

In the end the sander works Okay, but it is on my list to find that solid core pvc pipe. Alternatively I will switch to the idea of doing a bunch of plywood or solid wood circles, understanding that I have to mount anything perfectly centered.

In my case I used my old Shopsmith as the motor. That part of the plan worked very well as the Shopsmith is a very stable base and the motor is very stout as well as speed-adjustable.

My first attempts at thicknessing were passable but not anything I would want to continue to use.