Mounting a router as a sander

[paulphot]

Hi everyone, I have just found this website and I like the ideas people are coming up with.

I have decided to try and mount my old 1/4 inch router into a stand that can have a drum mounted in the collet for drum sanding (it will be mounted as if in a router table) and also be able to have an 8 or 9 inch sanding disk fitted and stood on it's side.

I still have a lot of basics to work out, mostly sorting accessories like the velcro faced backing plates and stuff but I'll keep you updated on how it goes.

Cheers

Paul

[ger21]

Don't try that. It's very unsafe. An 8" diameter disc spinning in a router will be spinning many times faster than it was ever designed for. Most likely you'll see terrible vibration for a few seconds before the 1/4" shaft bends or breaks, which will then be much worse than the vibration.

Even with a small drum, the high rpm's will more than likely burn the wood almost immediately.

Just a guess, but probably the maximum rpm you'd want is maybe 1000, not the 20,000+ most routers have.

[LeeWay]

I second that.
A router can be a very useful too for what it was designed for and even some things it wasn't, but putting anything large in it other than router bits will cause problems and could be very dangerous.
I make the mistake of putting a very small flycutter in one once. I turned it on and then back off almost instantly. It about shook out of it's mount. Very bad.

[paulphot]

Fair point, I was looking at running it on it's slowest setting as it has variable speed. I just found some specs on my particular model and what I thought was 1100 RPM is actually 11000 RPM. Thanks for the heads up guys, looks like I'm back to finding an old washing machine motor to drive the sander.

[Heinz Reimer]

I tried that a number of years ago. Here's what happened when I accidentally switched on the router at high RPM.

[Pplug]

Back when I was a teenager I took my fathers craftsman router and mounted a rubberized sanding disk to it. I touched the on switch and the router spun at 18k RPM -splitting the disk in two pieces, hitting me in the balls! 15 minutes later after icing my package, I started sanding by hand, with a new respect for 18K RPM!

[ger21]

Good thing I didn't have food in my mouth, because I would have spit it all over the screen, lol. That's funny. And another god reason not to do this.

[paulphot]

Yeah, I like my balls right where they are...

[TOTALLYRC]

Back when I was a teenager I took my fathers craftsman router and mounted a rubberized sanding disk to it. I touched the on switch and the router spun at 18k RPM -splitting the disk in two pieces, hitting me in the balls! 15 minutes later after icing my package, I started sanding by hand, with a new respect for 18K RPM!

I guess what you are saying is that you have a well sanded package. LOL

I once had a sanding disc do the same thing. It was even mounted on the proper tool but the disk must have been bad and I didn't check it before hand.

I spent 5 minutes on the floor trying to breath and it took a total of 15 min before I could get up.

Mike