Sleeveless Sanding Drums

photographs by the author

I most often use my decades-old 2" drum chucked in my drill press and wrapped in fine-grit sandpaper.

My main drum sander is a simple shop-made affair: a plywood box containing a salvaged motor fitted with a chuck to hold a 3″ sanding drum. With a 60-grit sanding sleeve on the drum, it’s a real workhorse when it comes to smoothing curves, but I don’t use it for finish work. Sleeves with finer grits are available, but they’re $4 apiece, hard to get on and off the rubber drum, and too stiff to smooth radiused edges. For finer work, I've been using sleeveless sanding drums. They are built around rigid foam cylinders and hold strips of common sandpaper. The exterior of the cylinder is padded with a layer of 1/8″ neoprene, and one end of the cylinder is fitted with a cast-aluminum flange and a steel axle. The ends of the sandpaper strip are tucked into a slot in the drum and led to a long, round hole where a length of steel oval tubing rotates to secure them. A lever is inserted into the tubing to rotate it, but a straight-bladed screwdriver will do the job just as well when that little lever included with the drum goes astray.

The the drive shaft has a diameter of 1/2" where it joins the fitting on the drum, but is reduced to 3/8" to fit most drills.