If you do a lot of sanding, you have probably been considering the different types of power sanders available and trying to figure out just which ones would be the most useful to you, as even the best best best belt sanders for woodworking may not be useful for some projects.. One of the options that has recently become available to people who do woodworking from home is drum sanders. It used to be these were only made for more professional woodworking shops, but now there are many available for home use. These can really make your job easier if you sand a lot of large pieces of wood.
One of the advantages of drum sanders is that you can quickly sand large pieces of wood of varying sizes and thicknesses. You can even get the sander to even out pieces of wood that you have connected together that might not be exactly the same thickness. You can also sand off any stains and flatten out wood with a slight bow to it.
Although drum sanders will not take off very much thickness from a piece of wood at each pass, it will leave you with a very smooth finished product, so it can be even more useful than a planer in getting a piece of wood to the right thickness. It might take more passes, but the final product will be closer to ready to use.
Another good thing about drum sanders is that they do not mark or leave cuts in the ends of the pieces of wood you put through them. This means that you won’t need to worry about trimming down pieces of wood and your waste will be less. You also can put pieces through that are at their final size without worrying about them getting damaged.
One thing to keep in mind is that these sanders really do produce a lot of dust. Many have a place to connect dust collectors or shop vacs so you don’t need to worry about breathing in all this dust and getting it all over your workshop, however.
These sanders can be quite expensive, but there are a number of models that are under $1,000. Some of the high end sanders also feature inflatable or even oscillating drums. You will have to balance out their usefulness to you with their cost to see whether or not this is something that would be worthwhile for you to purchase for your home woodworking shop. If you do decide to go shopping for a drum sander some brand to check out are Sparrow, Performax, Jet, Delta, Foley, Shop Fox, Clark and Woodmaster.
