Making a Drum Sander - Part 4 - Propulsion

Since the beginning, I intended to use my current belt sander as a power source for the drum sander. On a picture in one of my previous articles on it can be seen how I used an old abrasive belt for this when I was making the drum cylinder concentric.

The belt is spanned between the motor wheel and spanning wheel on the belt sander, and the pulley wheel on the drum sander. As you can see, the pulley wheel was originally made similarly to how one for a rubber belt would be, with raised sides. With an old abrasive belt, it did work, but I did not intend to use abrasive belts as the ultimate solution, they are not that durable and they have low traction.

Thus I ordered 4x50x1500 mm leather belts, I cut one on both ends at a steep angle in both directions (width & thickness) and glued the ends with contact cement. I also intended to strengthen the joint with stitches but it seems unnecessary.

However despite my best efforts the leather belt was not glued perfectly straight and it tended to jump out of the pulley groove. I tried to increase the fence height but that only resulted in the belt jumping off the motor wheel. Luckily it did not take me long to find a solution and it was not difficult. I removed the outer fence entirely and increased the width of the pulley by two cm. That way the belt can oscillate on the pulley from side -to side while being on track on the motor and spanning wheels.

After a few hours of runtime, the leather belt slacked a bit, which was to be expected. I cut out about 1 cm, glued it again and it has run without problems since then.

With propulsion solved, I could progress to the next step – fixing the abrasive on the drum. About that next week.