I originally was thinking of using the table as a lift mechanism, but there wasn’t enough room / space for it.edma194 wrote: ↑Fri Oct 18, 2024 12:05 pm I like it! Did you consider using a leg in the carriage to to raise and lower the front conveyer belt drum? Or 2 legs to move the entire assembly up and down? You can use legs from a lathe tool rest or from any model main table.
You can buy a lathe tool rest leg for $80 from Shopsmith. For $90 you can get a whole Model 500 tie bar assembly with 2 legs if you wanted to raise the entire assembly up and down instead of just tilting it. And you can do much better than that buying the parts from eBay. For the limited space you have under the drum you might need to cut down the tops of the legs.
How easy is it to change drums? I think I'd want at least 2 for fine and coarse grits.
I didn't even think about the options you present. But I am going to look at it and see how it could work. Without looking, that may be a very good idea & doable…. Thanks for that…
In Stumpy’s video he made 3 drums to accommodate different grits. I only made one, different than his (which just had turned ends), by filling the PVC with 3/4” plywood disks making it what I think is more solid and stable. Depending on how this was going to work I can make additional drums to hold other grits. So the drum is easy to change, just loosen the quill, remove the drum, and insert another. Changing the sandpaper would be more difficult and I don’t have plans to change it, I’ll just make another drum.
I used a saw arbor with a nut epoxied into the plywood disks to drive the drum. This was modeled after Stumpy’s plans and it works fine, but on the next drum I’ll probably use a lathe faceplate. With the saw arbor, you can only run the headstock in one direction (the other direction will loosen it) where a faceplate could allow running in either direction.