Since I started making knives I wanted a belt sander. The nice 2x72 models that everyone seems to use are too big for my shop, expensive, and hard to obtain where I live.
So I made my own
It is very compact and works with 1.5x38 belts. It has belt tensioning and tracking, adjustable speed with a vfd, a little work table with adjustable angle and exchangeable arms so I could also mount a contact wheel.
It works better than I expected, except for some minor vibrations from the drive wheel. I’ll replace that with a better part in the future.
It speeds up my work by so much, just cutting and filing this knife blank would have taken me ~2 days before, now it took me about an hour
Wow, thank you very much for that compliment!
To be fair I could never build a machine like Mathias Wandel without a CNC
But I definitely thought of him when I built it
The large drive wheel is cut from multiple layers of plywood, then i mounted it on the motor and turned it so it would be as round as possible. This didn’t work as well for the smaller wheels, so I 3d printed them with PETG filament, since this should hold up better to high temperatures. So far they hold up pretty well
