What if you had a big old drum sander with a bent table? It will cost you a few cents per pound to throw away, but this machine is great and will serve you well if you throw it away. That's when inspiration struck. To restore this old machine, [Frank Howarth] built a new wooden base for an old drum sander.
The machine is an early 20th century Frank H. Clement surface sander. This machine is basically a 30-inch long, 14-inch diameter drum covered with sandpaper. There is a removable table for this machine and it is basically a hinge that can handle boards up to 30 inches wide, using only sandpaper. [Frank] bought this car for free from a friend in 2015, but everything came with a price. There was a problem with this grinder: one of the previous owners had a heavy load on the table and a heavy metal base was bent in the middle. This makes old surface grinders completely useless. New beds had to be built.
[Frank] was a master craftsman and had enough scrap wood to make almost anything. After careful measurements on the frame grinder, he cut and glued several large panels of LemLam blocks salvaged from previous jobs. These blocks are very strong, and if you cut them again and glue them together into panels, you end up with very large, sturdy boards that are perfect for the base of those big old surface sanders.
The actual production of the new bed is done on [Frank's] CNC milling machine. Attaching the bed frame to the cast iron frame was easy enough, but there was one problem: because the table was designed to rest on a rotating drum, [Frank] had to cut a hole in the bottom of the table. A CNC router can easily do this, but the LemLam bar doesn't seem to be able to do it - part of the edge comes off. These panels are mostly made of glue and some quick work with some staples saved the project.
The bed of this crusher is now complete and the pulley changes reduce the drum speed to a reasonable value. Of course, this is an early 20th century woodworking machine and safety is secondary. But we weren't worried. [Frank] still has all his fingers. The belt guard works though.
