Sander Stands Reviews

I recently recieved this sander although I ordered the version with the enclosed base(a nice option- good storage underneath for belts and discs- you have to go through all the Jet listings on Amazon to find it). Its very nice- lots of power, the spring loaded belt tension arm is a nice touch, although the tracking adjustment requires attention more often than other sanders I've used - it does the job though. The dust collection works pretty well, the miter gauge isn't very accurate, but for normal wood-working it should suffice. Nice machine, my second Jet tool.

Tried to bog it down just to test it.....it is TOUGH....it is a little hard to get used to the belt tracking mechanism, but once you master it...you have a really durable tool.

This combination disk/belt sander replaced a Sears disk/belt sander. I didn't know how bad it was until I got the Jet sander set-up and running. The factory where they built the sander has a very good workforce to build a VERY GOOD product. With this in mind, I will buy another Jet product in the future.

Excellent machine for the price, very sturdy construction, high quality build. However, it is slightly let down by the belt tracking mechanism. As reported by another reviewer, I also find I am constantly adjusting the tracking, and if the tracking lever is knocked it throws it out. Still a very nice machine though.

Awesome. Jet is the way to go! High quality and great performance.

Great piece of equipment. Very solid piece of top-notch equipment that operates quietly and vibration free. The direct-drive unit delivers plenty of power (especially when wired for 230 V) and has no belts to slip, adjust or wear out. The built-in dust collection with a single 4" connection make hooking it up to a dust collector a simple operation.

The sander weighs over 200 lbs., so have a friend or some good lifting equipment available for unpacking and assembly.

The closed cabinet base is very nice and has a much smaller footprint compared to an open stand. If you plan to move this unit, I recommend removing the installed wheels and brakes and put it on a mobile base. The no-swivel wheels are not much use unless you plan to move the sander in straight lines only. The wheels also narrow the base support enough to make the unit slightly unstable.

For the price of this stand it is one of the most helpful inexpensive ways to get a stand alone sanding unit. Now I'll amdit to being a big DeWalt fan, even so I must still comment on the ability to make easy and precise adjustments. This unit is easier to set up and put away than any bench top units available, so if bench space is a concern this is for you(and me). Love it

The Performax Open Stand came well packaged and in good condition. It went together easily in 1/2 hour with minimal fuss. I also bought the locking casters to go with it and I'm glad that I did. The machine if fully mobile now and locks down tight when I want it to.

We've enjoyed the convenience of being able to sand wide face frames, and panels easily. The electronic controls make use relatively mindless. The Sandsmart control, which monitors
belt speed relative to depth of cut, is helpful in sustaining belt life. The electric table movement is a necessity, as the table is heavy, and somewhat difficult to move by hand. The down side of this machine is that the sandpaper can be easily ruined
by getting one burn mark, etc.. Then it's time for a new wrap, or two,
at forty dollars each load. At a fraction of the cost of a wide belt sander, it's been a good alternative for our small shop.

First order arrived broken (plate on disc sander cracked). Broke a vertebrae getting it all loaded up and returned (had to get to a loading dock!).

Took another month for the second sander to arrive. It was missing 2 stand parts, so I had to build a separate stand. Amazon never shipped the new parts.

Sander goes together easy, works well. Powerful. Buy it at one of the many other good tool sites. My last Amazon tool purchase.

I love the Jet belt/disc sander. It is my 4th Jet tool. However, a word to the wise.....if you find the need to replace the graphite platen pad, which I recently did, give Woodworker's Supply a try. Not Jet (WMH Tool Group) Jet's price is higher, the shipping rate is ridiculous, and I am still waiting for my order. I wish that Amazon carried them!!!

I Bought this three days ago and it works great.No problems with assembly and sands hard maple without bogging the motor down at all.I keep seeing bad reviews on amazons shipping practices and the condition the merchandise is in when customers receive it.I guess I'm the only lucky one that has a retailer close by that sells woodworking machinery.I personally have never bought any machinery over the internet just for the fact that i like to inspect what i am buying before i take it home to put it to use,it sure seems that taking that approach to shopping would alleviate alot of peoples problems.I really think I see more complaints about shipping problems on the reviews on this site than actual reviews of the merchandise advertised here.

Don't get me wrong here, this is a real good machine. Very heavily built, excellant finish, and very quiet. The dust collection is great, it has plenty of power and tracks well. But I had to return it and replace it with the Shop Fox G4790(see separate review). There were a couple of reasons for this. First you cannot remove the end piece from the belt sander and sand on the radius. This piece is an intregal part of the tracking system and must remain on the machine when sanding. I need a machine that I can sand/shape large radius on. Second..I need a machine that I can quickly change belts, as I will go thru 4-5 differant grits in a 10 minute period. Changing the belt on this machine involves removing parts...too slow. The last item was the casters...they should be heavier duty. If I had kept the machine I would have changed them out for Gizzly 3" locking casters.
If none of these are important to your use, I would recommend this sander. It's a nice machine and I wish I could have kept it.

Purchased in February 2004 to replace a smaller sander that wore out after 15 years. I was impressed with the quality of the machine. Tracking was easily set up and has stayed true. Plenty of power, smooth operation and the vaccuum system is helpful in dust removal. Only negative was in the foot lever to lock the wheels which bent if I engaged the lock with a foot. Worked fine if one used a hand to set the lock. This flimsey locking mechanism should be improved.

I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS UNIT. IT IS MY FIRST JET PRODUCT AND I AM VERY SATISFIED WITH THE QUALITY AND OPERATION. WAS A LITTLE SKEPTICLE AT FIRST BECAUSE OF THE SMALLER H.P. MOTOR , BUT SOON FOUND OUT THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM.

Solid and stable. Easy to assemble. Too short for my liking. Would have liked it to be ~4" taller. Bolting the grinder with a 2X under helped.

Excellent heavy duty grinder stand. Very sturdy with handy center tray adding very good support. Easy to assemble with only one socket wrench. Took only about 15 minutes to assemble. Delta had the foresight to even include the necessary bolts, nuts and lockwashers for mounting a grinder to the stand. A nice touch. The included rubber leg caps keep the stand from slidiing around on tile workshop floors. This is a must have item for anyone who wants to save space on their workbench. This stand makes your grinder totally portable making it a far better choice then the pedestal type stands that must be permanently bolted to the floor. Highly recommended!

A drum sander is a pretty basic machine; a sandpaper conveyer belt moves the wood under a spinning cylinder/drum that is covered in replaceable sand paper. Tensioned rollers keep the wood pressed down on the conveyer so it doesn't slip. The drum can be moved up and down to apply the proper sanding depth.

The problems some reviewers have had with this machine are:

1. There is a problem adjusting the tracking of the conveyer belt, which is like a giant portable belt sander. The belt can drift to one side or the other. The front roller is adjustable so the belt stays centered.

To facilitate this adjustment, Performax has included clever little captive wrenches built into the frame of the conveyer assembly. This should make the adjustment easy. However, mine drifted to the left and adjusting it had no effect. I ended up completely loosening all the adjusters, and starting over again. This time the belt centered and it was easy to adjust exactly to where it was supposed to be.

I suspect that the belt, which after all is 16" wide, might have been just a hair out of square and all the adjusting served to stretch it out to a perfect rectangle. I believe the problem is that some belts may be more out of square than others. The actual mechanism is unlikely to be defective.

2. Adjusting the sanding drum so it is parallel to the conveyer belt is obviously important, but it is not easy to do. There is a knob that you turn to move the outer end of the drum up and down until it is set correctly. However, one must loosen 4 (!) bolts to free the assembly so it will move and then tighten them to hold it in place. The act of tightening them moves the adjustment out of place. If you are a zillionith of an inch off on the inside, then you are way off 16" away on the outboard end. One can spend a lot of time messing with this.

Amazon recommends setting the outer end a teeny bit up when sanding panels wider than the drum. This will result in a high spot in the middle of the panel which is better than low spots or grooves caused by the outer end of the drum digging into the wood. However, adjusting the drum is such a pain that most people will be content to set it once and leave it.

I set mine to be just a tiny bit up, an unmeasureable amount. I send my boards destined for glue-up twice through on the final sanding , turned around the second time, so that each board side is equally thick on all edges.

3. Replacing the sandpaper just takes a little practice. Clearly, it must be installed properly to work well. The paper rolls onto the drum and each end is secured by little levered clips in the ends of the drum. A little tool is supplied to loosen the inbord clip, but I find that just just reaching and pulling it up with a finger is easier.

4. Some users have problems with the drum motor overload breaker popping. Pushing the reset button starts it up again. This is all by design so that you do not try to sand off more than you should in one pass or set the conveyer belt speed too high.

You must sand at a shallow depth and at low feed rate. If you think the sanding process is too slow and get impatient, just think of hand sanding. Even set at a crawl, the machine is way faster than you. All this depends on the grit, the kind wood, the width of the wood as well as the conveyer speed and the depth of cut.

I am careful to set a shallow sanding depth and a pretty slow feed rate and so I rarely have to reset it. If it does pop I just slow down the conveyer belt some more. This is a small machine with limited horsepower for small shops. There is a reason they make those 30 hp one-ton units. Like Norm's.

4. Some have complained about slop in the drum adjuster. The crank that moves the drum up and down has a lot of play in it so it is hard to feel how much actual adjustment is going on when the crank is turned. Tactile feel is very important when you are trying to adjust things just a hair. These sorts of measurements are too small to show up on the depth guage.

The adjuster should be equiped with an adjustable friction device. Several of my small tools have that feature and clearly a $1000 machine should. And I really miss an adjustable positive depth stop like my Makita planer. This would allow for a repeatable final sanding depth.

5. Snipe has been reported as a problem and it is. It is very difficult to hold the wood perfectly level as it enters and exits the drum. Setting up multiple roller stands is not easy and others have mentioned that the optional in and out-feed tables are difficult to level as well.

Some sort of built-in support is necessary for this machine to work properly. The tables, or other devices, should have been built in to the design and included in the price. This should not have been an option. It is like making the tires optional on a car. Speaking of options, I have a new Grizzly 6" jointer that came with built-in wheels. Very nice. Really quite necessary for the small shop. Aftermart wheels are available elsewhere.

So, what is my advice? This machine can be adjusted to function perfectly. When it is set up properly it is indeed a very useful and important tool. The problem is that the adjustments are too difficult and so many machines are out of adjustment and simply do not work as they should. In addition, not including the tables introduces an unnecessary cheap and greedy factor.

Performax is clearly not losing any money selling these units for $1000. Add on the the price of sandpaper and options and it is an even more costly option for the small shop. A tweak to the drum depth adjuster, a redesign of the drum levelling mechanism, a positive stop for the sanding depth, incorporating feed tables and making the stand mobile are really simple and inexpensive upgrades that lucky owners in the future hopefully will enjoy. I note that Grizzly now has a comparable consumer model and I suspect other manufactorers will enter the market. That competition will hopefully lower the price and increase the utility.

The whole idea of smoothing wood with rocks glued to fabric seems sort of strange, really. Perhaps the future will bring lasers or microwaves or something modern. In the meantime, be aware that sanders create a lot of dust, the fine and dangerous kind, much worse than shavings and such. I looked into shop dust control, hoping to get a simple vacuum, and found a whole confusing and expensive anti-dust world out there. A portable vac is not the best thing to use for high volumns of fine dust. Big dust collectors, cyclones and those sorts of things are more appropriate for this machine, but are very speciallized and expensive. I use the screaming Sears vac now (are all Sears product planners deaf?), but for many reasons that will have to change.

I can't go below 3 stars if, in the end, the machine actually performs as it should, but the inconvenience and cheapness factors noted above and in other reviews cost it a couple of stars.

I bought this machine for a job last year that involved getting about 4500 board feet of red and white oak back from the kiln, planed down to 1 inch thick. All this lumber had to be sanded with at least 100 if not 120 or 180 grit paper depending on the application. The 16-32 is a little under-sized for a job like that but it eventually got all the lumber sanded. It saved enough in labor to pay almost half the tool off immediatly. The performax really shines sanding short boards up to say 6 ft. The 1" thick, 12 to 14 foot long, 8 inch wide baseboards we were making required a much more precise infeed and outfeed than could be acheived by having a person standing at each end. If the end of the board is allowed to drop below the level of the table and put even the slightest pressure on the drum it will trip the overload breaker on the motor and the resulting divit in the wood can be very difficult to sand out. When my new shop is complete I will build an infeed/oufeed table 10 feet on either side of the tool to facilitate sanding longer, heavier stock. I will never go back to sanding boards with my orbital sander. The Performax has made sure of that and is easily capable of better results than you would expect from a modestly priced, mobile drum sander.

I have read thru all the reviews here and I have come to 2 conclusions people either love this machine or they hate it.The second one is,this machine can be a little troublesome to set up and use.
I came across a good deal on a used machine thru my local Wood supplier. I was leary but decided to check it out. The seller said that he liked it but his shop was too small and he needed the room. He claimed that he did not have any of the problems I read here. It looked good so I bought it.
Now this guy is an Engineer so maybe that helps because this machine runs like a Champ. Everything was setup precisely. One thing he did for setting up the drum alignment was he used two 2" square Mahogony blocks as a setup gauge instead of the rule and feeler gauges. Works great.
I had some minor problems with belts loading and burn marks but I figured that into the learning curve of a new machine I have never used before. So far no problems with the ceramic guides.
I have used it everyday now for the past 3 weeks and it is a time saver. I like it and I am pleased with it.I am one of those who love this machine. You just need to take your time setting it up. I only wished that I had the money to get a bigger one.
P.S. Think this is tough to setup? Try setting up a Radial Arm saw, this is nothing.

I have to say that it took me some time before I used my new Delta drum sander. I DID NOT get the "limited edition" model. I read on several woodworkers chat forums about how the learning curve on drum sanders is really steep, and that the sanders are very hard to adjust, etc. I wondered numerous times if I should have bought a Performax instead.
Well I finally wired up 220 volt for my new Jet canister DC (I read that you can't use a drum sander without a DC hook up). I found some scrap pieces of oak, maple and cherry and started playing around with it. The drum sander worked like a charm. I got no snipe (one of the many complaints I read about), no burn marks, and the sander never stalled. I then changed the pre wrapped paper, and started swearing until I figured out I was starting from the wrong end of the drum (no jokes about guys never reading the directions please). The sander seems to be built like a tank, does what it is suppose to do (it is not a planer) and was easy to put together. I recommend it.

I've had this machine for about 24 hours, and I've already gotten great results. Since it is still brand new, I'll restrict my review to shipping, setup and initial results.

SHIPPING

I actually received the machine about 4 days before I expected it, and the box was in premo condition, so I give shipping 5 stars.

SETUP

I expected to spend about 4 hours setting the machine up and getting it fine tuned. It actually took about an hour and a half, including installing the pneumatic drum sander. The instructions were clear and very easy to follow. After assembling the sander, I ran the tests recommended by Delta to make sure the drum was parallel with the table and the in-feed belt tracked ok. The folks at the factory did an excellent job because no - and I mean no - adjustments were necessary. The drum is perfectly parallel with the table and the in-feed belt tracks true. I give assembly and factory settings 5 stars.

FIRST RESULTS

I build hammered dulcimers, which require a trapazoidal soundboard that is about 20" deep, 1/4" thick and about 40" at its widest. The soundboards are made of Western Red Cedar, which is soft and shows every imperfection. Since the soundboard is deeper than the drum sander, I need to make two passes to sand the entire surface. I was concerned that the soft wood would show a ridge at the overlap. No problem. The soundboard (which is going on my latest dulcimer) is flat as a table top and looks great. I couldn't be happier.

My only gripe is with one of the retaining clips that holds the sanding belt on the drum. One of the clips is almost impossible to open with my fingers, and I have to use a pair of pliers to squeeze the clip and insert the belt. The other clip is just fine. I'm going to contact Delta about it. Because of the clip problem, I rate first results at 4 stars.

Would I recommend this machine for the small shop? You bet!

I got the sander and while assembling it noticed that the support for the power feed assy was bent and the screws holding it in alignment were overtightened causing the lock washers to spread.This would not let the feeder set down flat. The lockwashers had to be removed. The shaft for the free accessory drum sander was badly bent and caused the machine to vibrate very badly. I have emailed Delta and await their reply. I did get the main sander working and it seems to be smooth and does a fine job. Seems like Delta can still design a good tool. They just have trouble building them.