marc - well today we're talkingabout one of my absolute favorite woodworking tools ever invented, the drum sander. (upbeat music) well, hello my friends. i hope you had a wonderful christmas, i know i did and it's timeto get back in the shop and get some crap done. so, before we starttalking about drum sanders,
i did want to bring up alittle follow up concerning the gaming dining table. you might recognize thislittle thing that i built. it's part of the accessory system and this was really intended to be just a simple version of a cup holder. something you could just lay a cup... it's more like a cup shelf. a cup or a mug would fit on this just fine
but nicole saw it and herfirst reaction was like, "no." she wanted something alittle bit more elegant, that you can actually dropa can or a cup or something into and really stopsit from tipping over. this was just me being lazy. so, i went back to the drawing board. looked into some of thesepre made cups that you can put into gaming tables and other surfaces. and found a hole saw...
three and three eighths hole saw. it's incredibly easy to takea nice flat platform like this drill the proper size hole and then drop this sucker in there. you've got a much more versatile and really a safer cup holderthan the one that i just made. hey, i tried right? alright, let's get to our email. our email comes from alan parham?
parram? param? he says... well since the pm2244 ispretty new to the market, not a lot of people have it, i'm getting a lot of questions about it. so, we'll make this sortof a mini review as we answer alan's question. first of all, let's lookat this cantilever design. as you can see the drum isonly supported on one side. so, is that a problem over time?
well not really. i mean these things doeventually go out of calibration but you always have ameans to adjust for that. this cantilever design is notsomething that's unique to powermatic drum sanders. in fact most of the small format home or small shop drumsanders are made this way. it's probably less expensiveto make it that way but it's also a little more versatile
and the reason is becauseyou can run boards that are wider than the drum. so, this is a 2244, that'swhy they're named that. almost all drum sanders have two numbers. one is the first pass and if you flip the piece around and run it again a second time, you can sand the other side. so, effectively a 22 inch drum can yield a
44 inch standing surfaceby flipping it around. that's pretty cool. honestly, i don't reallyuse that feature very much. i find it to be a little bitfinicky to make sure that you don't get a line in your work. most of my work fits withina 22 inch span anyway. the key though, with all ofthis, is whether or not the tool is easy to adjust. that is where this particular pm2244
sets apart from the rest. a couple years ago my trusty drum sander went out of whack andi needed to adjust it. i lost four days of worktrying to get this thing perfectly adjusted and i'm not really superpicky about this stuff. i just could not get the drumin alignment with the platform and i couldn't get the feed rollers to sit in the right placebecause they were sorted of
connected to the drum adjustment. it was a mess. so, i was so frustrated, i went out and bought a supermax. supermax makes great drum sanders. so, they had really improvedon the adjustment mechanism and i enjoyed using that for a few years. when i got a hold of this powermatic... this is what, sort of alightbulb went off and said,
"why isn't everybody doing it this way?" it's just so simple. no tools required at all. all you have to do is turn the dial. alright, you do have to usea little bit of pressure to get it to move andthat's kind of a good thing because if you bumped into it and it moved that'd bea real pain in the butt. so, you can see, it's notmoving when i just hit it
but i have to deliberatelymove the dial to make those adjustments and it adjusts the bed. the drum stays where it is and you basically adjust theoutboard side of the bed. so, to finish answering alan's question, just about any of thesecantilever design drum sanders will exhibit the same properties. the real thing that separatesthem is how easy they are
to adjust because at some point, no matter what brand you buy, you will have to make that adjustment. so, it's a good thing to haveone that turns with a dial. let's look at a couple of theother features, real quick. just so you can see whatthis sander is about. something i didn't even notice at first, is that the drum is off set. you have more conveyormaterial in the front
than you do in the back. the logic behind thatis you need more grip surface in the frontbecause that's where you're getting all your pressure. pushing through the sanding drum. so, it kind of makes senseto have a little bit more at the front than you have at the rear. we've got a nice digital display, which of course has the feed rate.
(machine starts) here we've got a relativedepth adjustment. so as i move the drum up or down, i can really dial it in but it's relative. so, you simple zero it out, wherever you need it to be zeroed, like on top of a board and then you can make youradjustments from there. of course you've got thefour inch dust port here
and pretty standard fare on the inside. really nice comfortableclips with a lot of room. the drum is raised above the body and i tell you what if you evertry to install this tapered sandpaper on a drum that'sreally deeply imbedded in the casing here,that's a pain in the butt. so, this is really niceand convenient to reach. overall it's a solid drum sander but the real game changer for me...
the thing that makes a difference is this adjustment dial. absolutely in love with it. so, i highly recommendthis particular unit but for alan, just about anygood quality cantilever design is probably going to be adequate for what he's looking to do. if he really needs to step uphis game to a bigger machine, when you start to get beyond this size,
you probably do want togo with something that has support on both sides because the drum just getsa little bit too wide. alright, so thanks for watching everybody. think about getting a drum sander. it's a heck of an investment but man it's one that you'renever going to regret.