There are some interesting projects coming soon, ones that I’ve been planning for a while. The first, and closest to completion, is a combination belt / disk sander. It will have a 1″ x 30″ belt and a 5″ disk, and can be powered either with a small motor, or with a regular hand-held drill. It’s made mostly from plywood, 1/2″ and 3/4″ with some common hardware:

It has a tilt table for both the disk and the belt, but doesn’t use difficult to make trunnions. Should be just the thing for shaping small parts and for sharpening.

Plans will be available when the project is released, my guess would be early August.

Another, much bigger project will be my jointer. I will use the cutter head from my 12″ thickness planer (problems with this planer covered here) and drive it with a 1-1/2 HP motor. The motor is a true 1.5HP, not the peak power shop vac BS ratings. Still, I’m not entirely certain it has enough oomph to run such a large cutter. I guess I’ll find out.

The jointer is not anywhere near to being started yet. I’m still just batting ideas around in my head at this point. A while ago I did do a very quick sketch to toy with an idea I have for it:

That’s to mount the cutter on a bias, 10 degrees off 90. This should do three things that a normal, 90 degree mounting won’t do: first, it should plane the wood a bit more efficiently, since the cutting will be going slightly across the grain. Second, it should hide nicks in the knives more effectively and third, it will push the work tight to the fence as it passes. I see these as advantageous and I’m a little surprised that a major manufacturer has not done this (to the best of my knowledge.

It will be made mostly from plywood, with sheet steel as the top and to clad the fence. When considering material for this, I have to take into account potential wear, and I know that steel is hard to beat for this. The infeed will be a single inclined plane that will lock rigidly in position. The outfeed will be fixed – any adjusting of cutter head to outfeed table will be done by shimming the pillow blocks for the cutter head.

I’m very eager to get started on this, but it will have to wait until I get enough free time to devote to it.

Stay tuned!