Pat's thickness sander - an update

Pat Hawley writes:

Hi Matthias,

Just thought I'd let you know that I bought a new (well, slightly used) Ryobi drum sander. Here's a picture:

Since I feel like I've betrayed the approximately 131,000 people that have checked out the Youtube video you made of mine I thought I give you the reasons I bought this:

    1) It was only $300 (used), stand included, which was a great price. It would probably cost close to that to make my home-made one. Similar sized new ones are around $1K.

    2) Having a conveyer belt to feed in the wood makes it much less effort, safer, and the finish will be better because the feed rate will be more consistent.

    3) Being made of metal, I shouldn't have any issues of it going out of being true due to humidity.

Despite the advantages, there are some things I can do on my home-made drum sander that I won't be able to do on the new one. This is because on my home made-drum sander, I can take off the dust cover and push things just part way through. This is how I make the curved sections on the back of the guitar head (i.e. the volute) and the guitar bridges for example. So I'll probably keep it despite the fact that space is becoming quite a premium in my basement.

Ryobi no longer makes this drum sander so I can't say what this one would go for new. However, similar sized ones made by Grizzly, Performax and King are all in the $1K price range new. The Performax Jet 16/32 looks very similar to this Ryobi. I think when they were selling them new, the Ryobi sanders were probably less money than the Performax drum sanders although when I was reading up on them online, some seemed to prefer the Ryobi.

Cheers,

Pat

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