The Dale C. Maley Family Web Site

October 2016

I bought this Delta Model 31-250 drum sander from a friend of mine earlier this year.



He sold me all his new sandpaper as well. I have only used it a few times before this latest project. On the latest project, the sander left a 1/4" wide burn mark on the 14 inch wide white oak piece.

I raised the top cover and inspected the sanding drum.....it look pretty bad and was filled with resin and stuff..........




Here is a LH side view of how the sandpaper was attached........



Here is a RH side view of how the paper was attached..........



The paper was wrapped CCW looking at it from the LH side.


On my belt sanders, disc sander, and drill press drum sander, I use an abrasive cleaning stick to remove gunk and debris from the belt.  I wonder if it wood work on this tool?

This is a relatively big drum spinning at about 1800 RPM, so I'm not sure how safe it would be to use this cleaning stick.  The sandpaper  could come loose while you are cleaning it and flap around and hit you I suppose.  I decided to go ahead and change the sanding belt.

I removed the old belt using the spring clips on both ends to release it. It was single-sided 180 grit.

The box of new sandpaper I chose was 120 grit..........This should be fine for the general purpose sanding I am doing.  I use this sander to get rid of the glue joints on boards that are wider than the 12.5" max width my planer can handle.



The new paper is single-sided and has a direction arrow on the back. I made sure the sandpaper was aligned correctly with respect to the arrow and the direction of drum rotation.  I used the old end of the sandpaper to mark and scissor cut the LH side starting angle.  I wrapped it CCW to the RH side.  I scissor cut the RH side to fit into the spring clip on the RH side.



I tried to wind the new paper to leave as little gap as possible between the wraps. I still have some small gaps, but so did the old one.  The manual says not to overlap the wraps..........I'm guessing because this would cause the 2 thicknesses of sandpaper to sand deeper than the rest of the drum.

I closed the cover in case the sandpaper came loose, started it up, and test sanded a small piece of pine.  It worked fine

Closing Thoughts
It did not take too long to change the paper the 1st time, maybe 30 minutes. It should go faster on future changes because I know how to do it now. I am not sure what happens when the paper becomes detached from either of the 2 end spring clips when it is running.........it is probably best to keep the top lid closed when the drum is spinning.



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