Belt sander belts

[u.p.man52]

I hate being a pest here, but I am new to knife making. I just purchased a 1 X30 belt sander. What belts and grit should I get for it? Any help is appreciated.

 

[KnuckleDownKnives]

I know you can get higher quality belts from Trugrit for that size. When I had mine I only used the Harbor freight belts, but only because I didn't know I could get better belts yet. I can't comment which ones to get though, I have no personal experience using them and don't remember reading any threads on which ones would be recommended to pass along. I still have a crap ton of belts for mine and only use it for deburring bolts and such anymore. Do you have a harbor freight 1x30?

 

[u.p.man52]

I know you can get higher quality belts from Trugrit for that size. When I had mine I only used the Harbor freight belts, but only because I didn't know I could get better belts yet. I can't comment which ones to get though, I have no personal experience using them and don't remember reading any threads on which ones would be recommended to pass along. I still have a crap ton of belts for mine and only use it for deburring bolts and such anymore. Do you have a harbor freight 1x30?

No. I bought mine from Menards

 

[KnuckleDownKnives]

No. I bought mine from Menards

Ok, so it's basically the same thing. I know on my bigger grinder the ceramic belts are great at removing material, but require a lot of pressure to work at their full potential. I'm not certain that is the case for the 1x30 belts. on the 2x27 belts if you don't use enough pressure they will actually dull and the grit wont fracture to resharpen itself. If that is the case with the smaller belts you may not be able to exert enough pressure without stalling the motor on that particular grinder, IDK personally. I can't really offer any other information other than that is a good source to buy them. Hopefully someone else will chime in.

 

[KnuckleDownKnives]

In the mean time if you use the custom search engine and type 1x30 belts there are a lot of posts to go through.

https://cse.google.com/cse/publicurl?cx=012217165931761871935:iqyc7cbzhci

use the lower search box not the top one.

 

[kuraki]

Mistake

 

[mike-E]

I can tell a lot of planning went into that beauty. I have to admit that the tracking adjustment has me baffled. How does the motor not tilt back in the horizontal position?edit:to add if there is a knob in the middle of the frame will it interfere with a small wheel attachment?

 

[milkbaby]

upman, I think you should try a few different brands and grits just to see what you end up liking. Not everybody works the same. It can also depend on how much grinding on annealed steel versus hardened steel you're planning on doing. When I started, I bought like 10 of each grit that I thought I needed but then I ended up with a lot left over of the ones I don't use much. One time I bought some cheap Harbor Freight belts, and those are total garbage, avoid like the plague!!!

For hogging steel off fast when I'm starting the grind, I've been using zirconia and ceramic low grit belts 36, 40, or 50 grit. The ceramic needs pressure to keep exposing more grit to cut, on a low powered 1x30 like I (and presumably you) have, it's easy to stall out the belt with too much pressure. However even with that issue, I've been very happy with how they work on soft annealed steel and haven't glazed them over, so I'll probably stick to them in the future. If you need to fracture the ceramic grit, you can break the 90 degree angle at the start of grinding a blade with them, and it's possible using the belt for profiling will also help fracture the ceramic grit.

For higher grit belts where I'm not trying to remove a lot of metal, I tend to cheap out and go to aluminum oxide. The general rule of thumb is that you usually can jump approximately double the grit, so I often go 40 grit to 80, 120, 220, 400.

Other people probably have better advice, but that's all I got. Have fun!

Got some time to tack together my prototype grinder. Definitely could make some ease of assembly modifications, and I think the ratchet mechanism is too coarse but we'll see when I actually get some wheels and a belt on there. Otherwise, everything worked as intended so far.

Pretty freaking cool, but accidental post to wrong thread?

 

[kuraki]

Yeah