JET 10-20 Drum Sander update

[capncarl]

This is an owners review of my JET 10-20 drum sander that I have owned one year now.

I won't bash the machine but will say that for a $600-$700 investment I expected better performance. If you were trying to remove some deep planer tear out you would probably rethink your planer.

Replacement of the sand paper on the drum proves to be a problem. Online reviews report that the paper fastening mechanism was flimsy and hard to operate and that paper installation was difficult but got easier with practice. I found these reviews to be correct and questioned the paper holding abilities of these mechanisms, and had a lot of problems keeping the paper tight on the drum. Several of my wood pieces were destroyed when the sand paper loosened and grabbed and created unrecoverable sanded gashes.
Ł
The conveyor belt was the focus of most of the reviews. Some owners claimed that they could not get the belt to track at all and JET had to replace a number of them. I found conveyor belt tracking to be really "iffy" and never was able to keep it tracked, but heeded the reviewers warnings and kept my eyes on it to prevent it from self destructing the belt.

All that said, despite the above mentioned problems the JET 10-20 drum sander has sanded everything I have fed through it.

Today I started to sand some 8" wide boards, the drum sander has not been used in 4-5 months.. The conveyor motor, a 90 volt variable speed fractional horsepower gear motor will not run. I removed the gear motor and checked the gearbox to see if it was stuck, not, must be the controller.

I guess I will get to see how the JET warranty is. I actually believe that their service center is the same as Rigid. Oh joy.

capncarl

[mpc]

I wonder how different your 10-20 design is compared to my three-or-so year old Jet 16-32? Looking at Jet's website, the drum and main drive motor look similar, the drum support structure and housing look different, and the conveyor belt and drive assembly really looks different.

I haven't experienced the bad issues you described. Getting the sandpaper strip tight does take a little practice, mostly in knowing just how much/little extra sandpaper strip to push past the starting clamp so that there is enough for the other end clamp. And using that little "TUF Tool" to grab the end clamp (inside the drum by the motor end of the unit for folks that don't know the Jet design) takes practice - you're trying to engage a small hole in a beefy spring-loaded clamp with a hook... and are pretty much working blind. When I change sandpaper on my unit, one of the first things I do is totally un-curl the far end... otherwise the curl makes the sand paper miss the slot in the clamping mechanism and the paper thus gets loosely held by the spring or some other item... not gonna work right! That happened one time to me and the paper did unwind making a mess of itself... but it didn't hurt the workpiece as I recall. I've also drawn (with a Sharpie) an arrow on the drum itself to remind me which way to rotate it as I load fresh paper.

It took a while to adjust my unit to parallel (sanding drum to platen). The little star knob works well enough on its own but keeping the drum from shifting as I tightened the 4 main bolts was difficult (10-20 has 2 bolts...). Getting the conveyor belt to track straight took a few iterations too - it's easy to over-tighten one side of the platen adjusters threaded rods+nuts (using the stubby captive wrenches) or leave the other side too loose. Once I got mine adjusted though it's been rock solid for a few years now, still on the original belt.

Lessons I've learned:
1. To un-curl the final two inches of the sandpaper strip prior to trying to install it.

2. Once both ends of the paper are caught in the spring-loaded clips, I can "walk" any looseness towards the outer end of the drum with the easy to reach clamp.

3. Sanding sappy wood quickly gums up the sandpaper. This thing creates a lot of heat on the workpiece so any sap, old finish, etc. tends to liquify and then becomes HARD crud on the sandpaper. Pretty much ruins the ($$$) paper when that happens; cleaning this stuff off is like scraping dried epoxy squeeze-out. Taking thinner passes helps reduce the heat and thus reduces the problem. Really watch for this with pine. My conveyor drive unit has the "Sand Smart" system which basically monitors the work being done by the main drum drive motor and slows down the conveyor if I've got the sander taking off too much material. I don't see this on the 10-20 manual so it'd be easy to lower the drum a tick too far resulting in excessive load on the sandpaper.

4. Supposedly you can sand workpieces wider than the unit since one end is open - i.e. up to 32 inch wide workpieces on my 16-32 unit. Doesn't work that well for me; there's always a small step. Either my drum & platen aren't perfectly parallel or, as I suspect, the unit isn't rigid enough to maintain parallelism when a workpiece is exerting pressure on the end of the drum. I can grab the open end of the drum assembly and flex it if I try hard enough... It works well enough to do 90% of the sanding job but I always have to hand-sand the last little bit to get rid of this mid-workpiece step. Still, less hand-sanding than doing the whole thing myself or with the ROS! haha, reading the online 10-20 manual just now mentions this problem and states to adjust the drum slightly non-parallel to the conveyor (higher at the open/outboard end) as a solution! For workpieces under 16 inches wide - where I don't need to "hang the work past the end of the sanding drum" - it does 100% of the sanding job and does it well.

5. When making multiple passes, adjusting the sanding drum height between passes as the workpiece gets thinner, I find that turning the handle only a quarter turn is too much. This thing does not like being asked to take off too much material!

I've been quite pleased with mine so hopefully Jet fixes the issue with your platen drive assembly. I use my drum sander all the time, pretty much anything that goes through the thickness planer gets run through my Jet 16-32 immediately after. Final thicknessing is almost always done by the drum sander since it tends to have less tear-out and less snipe issues than my planer (the squat square Dewalt 735). I have the add-on infeed/outfeed wings as well, they do make a difference.

mpc

[capncarl]

Update..... I contacted the JET service center phone number for my area, woke up some poor guy 2 times, wrong number on Internet. Then contacted JET, different time zone, 5 year warranty on this tool! They send a form and will send replacement parts. Easy enough! Now for the hard part, where did that purchase receipt go?
capncarl

[poolhound]

I have one of the earlier Performax 16-32 models. fitting the paper is a little fiddly but isn't too tough and I don't recall ever having an issue getting it tight enough. Maybe Jet changed the mechanism in some of the newer models. My biggest issue is with the conveyor belt tracking. I have never managed to get it to stay in one place. I did contact jet support and they suggested some realignment of the mechanism which I haven't manage to try yet.

[capncarl]

In the early years of my maintenance career I was responsible for a lot of the conveyor systems in our factory. I quickly learned that everything had to be square and plumb, just a scosh out and tracking was compermised. I also learned that the shorter the conveyor belt was the harder it was to track, just opposite what you would think. At least the drum sander belt travels slow, if not you could not keep it on the machine! I did notice the the conveyor drive gear motor mounts were slotted to allow up/down movement of the knurled drive roller. This roller needs to be perfectly aligned with the conveyor bed. Mine is off about 1/16" and may be the source of its tracking problem.
capncarl

[capncarl]

Jet 10-20 drum sander update. After I found the original recept I was able to send Jet a photo copy and a photo of the burned out diodes on the conveyor controller. 3 weeks later I returned from vacation to find the Jet parts waiting for me on my back door steps. Comparing the burned out controller to the new controller it appears that the 3 diodes that failed are larger on the new controller. Online complaints of this part failing mentioned these diodes, maybe Jet QC picked up on this and solved their problem. Thank you Jet! I also noticed that the new controller had several stickers showing the part had been high-pot tested.
In re-assembly of the conveyor I noticed that the drive roller was not aligned with the conveyor top and made the adjustment by moving the drive motor upward slightly so the roller is now square with the conveyor. The conveyor belt seems to track well now. While I had the belt off I was able to read the mfg. numbers and hope to be able to find a source of belts in case this one fails. $75 for a 10x34 sanding belt is a little steep.

[atgcpaul]

A while ago I had planned to replace the sandpaper clip on my Ryobi 16-32 with the better one from the Jet/Performax. I bought the clip but as I started to disassemble everything to get to the inside of the drum I realized it would be quite an ordeal and I didn't want to risk not being able to reassemble it since everything else on it worked fine.

So now I'm thinking the better route is to switch over to hook and loop. There are some DIY and some commercial kits out there that people have been happy with. I'm going to explore that. I bought mine used so I'm relatively happy for the money.

[capncarl]

I do not think the clips on the Jet are the same on both ends. I believe the outboard clip just grips the sandpaper but the inboard clip grips and pulls the paper. I would rather see the pulling clip on the outboard side so I can see and reach it better. Any kind of clamp that you replaced yours with would have to be close to what came on it or it could drastically effect the balance of the drum. I'd have to try it though because what is there is pitiful.
capncarl

[atgcpaul]

I got the Grizzly H&L kit the other night and I installed it last night on my Ryobi 16-32. I did have to figure out the angle to cut the hook portion since it's 5" wide and my regular paper is only 3". That stuff is sticky and you've pretty much got one shot to get it right.

I then installed the provided 80 grit loop roll in the opposite direction. Grizzly produced a good video for YouTube on the installation.

I turned it on, everything was clear, and then I ran a board through. Worked fine. I opened up the dust hood to snap a picture of the install but wanted to clean the dust off with a crepe stick. After using the stick for a few seconds, the whole roll of paper comes shooting off the drum and lands on a shelf a few feet away. I wrap the drum again and turn the machine back on and the same thing happens almost immediately without me touching the paper.

On the Grizzly video they wrap the ends of the drum with reinforced tape seemingly for good reason. The Grizzly machine is close ended so it's not a problem to wrap both ends, but on an open ended machine, you've cut the capacity in half if you wrap both sides. It happened so fast I couldn't tell what side the roll was peeling off from. The little tab of paper on the inboard side spins into the wind so I think that side probably lifted up and caused the whole roll to come undone.

Anyway, this morning I wrapped reinforced tape around the inboard side of the paper and I had no delamination. I hope that's the fix because I've missed having capabilities of the sander.

The Grizzly kit is for a much larger sander so you end up with enough H&L to do 2, maybe even 3 drums.

Paul