Grizzly G0459 12″ Drum Sander

Some shop tools can certainly be considered a luxury item. They are fantastic to have, make your life substantially easier, but they aren’t imperative to success like a table saw or a jointer. I classify our drum sander as an example of a luxury tool. It is absolutely fantastic and cuts down our production time immensely. Without it, a lot of our cutting boards and furniture pieces would take a lot longer to complete as they would require significant time hand sanding away the imperfections.

This unit from Grizzly is called their 12″ Baby Drum Sander. The automatic feed conveyor system works well to keep the pieces moving and it doesn’t depress down much which could cause irregular sanding patterns. If you are going to sand long pieces (I’d estimate anything over 36″) then you will want to set up some outfeed rollers to help you. We’ve been using ours for a few years now and it has performed quite well. Keep in mind you’ll want to be pretty diligent with the preventative maintenance. A good quality grease in your grease gun will help reduce potential problems as well as taking the time to give it a real good spring cleaning once or twice a year. We like to pull it apart as much as possible and really try to get at every little spot you can. The grease collects the fine particles the machine sands off and ends up making a weird paste that can be a nightmare to the inner workings.

Surfacing cutting boards (even ones with a lot of Titebond III on the top/bottom) with this machine and the 80 grit paper is a breeze. Drop on some 120/150 or higher and you can get a really nice finish very easily. When hand sanding 1″x6″x36″ with the palm sander we might spend 10 minutes per board to get them dialed in properly. With this machine, we’re spending 20-30 seconds each. The time savings and repeatable accuracy are worth every penny.

If I could change one thing about the machine it would be that the instructions tell you to use tape at the ends of the roller to make sure the velcro holding the sandpaper on doesn’t come loose. This tape eats into the 12″ of the total sanding area. We’ve seen that at max we have maybe 11.5″ but depending on how accurate we are with the tape its less. We often just limit ourselves to 11″ only. How often is this a problem? Rarely. But still, it’d be nice to have a full 12″ available.