JET 628900 Mini 10-Inch 1-Horsepower Benchtop Drum Sander, 115-Volt 1-Phase

Although I have had little experience with this sander as of yet, I can already tell it will be a welcome addition to my small shop. I woodwork for a hobby and sanding has always been a real pain to deal with. Like a lot of things I have purchased, I already wish I had a bigger unit, but being on a fixed income makes us work with what we can afford and what space we have available. This sander is what I call a work in progress tool. The more I use it, the more progress I can make. The instructions didn't detail the pace of feeding work into it and trying to install the sanding belt was an ordeal. More comprehensive instructions and better pics of belt installation would have been great. The tool for installing the belt seemed worthless and I wound up getting the belt on w/o the tool. What really would be beneficial is for some sort of way to hold the aluminum drum in a locked position so you could wind the sand paper around the drum w/o it turning and give you a solid way to hold the sand paper tight and push the tapered end of belt into the clamping area. All this being said, I really like the machine. It's not for commercial use, but then it is great for the small projects I can create. I think the price is fair compared to similar bench type sanders, and I think the quality is good. I also have a Jet table saw and a Jet mini lathe I am very pleased with. From what I can see, it looks like it will hold up for years to come and I have it mounted on a wheeled cabinet for easy access. No tool gets used if you have to go to great lengths to put it away and then drag it out. I can be ready to use it in about 2 minutes.

I have owned this drum sander for around two years and I am finding that I use it less and less in my shop. One of the first problems I had with it was the tracking guides for the table belt caused premature failure of the belt. They actually tore the belt. Once I removed them, I had better success with the replacement belt, but you need to watch the tracking closely.I felt that this drum sander was under powered for its size. I had constant problems with the onboard circuit breaker activating while doing just minimum sanding. The breaker button would not reset for 5 minutes, so I finally by-passed it. That helped out a lot.It wasn't like I was attempting to sand ¼" off of a 12" wide board, sometimes the breaker would trip when I was sanding a 4" wide piece of Oak and sanding off less than 1/16". It was very frustrating.The sanding belt itself is a trip to get on and once it's on, it is hard to keep it on until you run some pieces of wood through it. The belt needs constant attention during the wear in, or you will tear/rip it and it will be useless. It seems the belt stretches some with friction heat and you have to readjust it or it will tear.This unit is just not worth the money in my opinion. Bigger IS better.

I had a Performax 16-32 but had to downsize due to a recent move. This Jet 10-20 (They didn't send a Performax) is not the same quality as the Performax was, IMHO. The manual says that all adjustments were made at the factory but I had to adjust the tracking, conveyor belt tension, and roller position. The manual says that the trackers should be installed but they were already on the machine that I got. There are worn sections along the sides of the tracking belt which causes me to wonder if this machine is used. However, everything else looks new. The motor that runs the conveyor is quite noisy compared to my previous . This machine is heavy duty though as was the 16-32 and pretty much the same size and weight (except for the conveyor and drum). The dust port is on the back side of the drum roller rather than on the top (like the 16-32). Seems to be a better location for dust collection. I only ran a test piece of rough popular through so far and it came out okay. The paper is 80 grit. I ordered some finer grit paper but it's on backorder. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for now.Update August 2, 2008. I had not used this sander for awhile. I had a warped piece of 1/2" thick mahogany that I wanted to try and flatten. I did run it through a bunch of passes and it did take a lot of the warp out. For those who have had the motor lug and/or burning, this is mainly caused by trying to take too much off in a single pass. Yes, the wood will have scratch marks if the grit is too coarse. Just as in hand sanding, you have to go to finer grits toward the end of your sanding process. I finish with 180. The drum alignment was way off, but not difficult to change. This has to be done more often that one might think. The little holder tool works just fine. I'm just now buying the infeed/outfeed tables. If your paper starts filling up, you need to apply one of those gum rubber sticks. I got mine at Harbor Freight--makes your paper last a lot longer.