Ameribrade Fastback 2 x 72 Grinder Review w Timestamps

today we're going to put together then test this ameribraid fastback tilting 2 by 72 belt grinder if you want to skip around the video check the description for some time stamps in short it's got some fantastic features that put it at the top of its class and make it a terrific value but it's not without some drawbacks so stay tuned for more on that full disclosure i paid regular price for this minus ten percent with an agreement that i'd provide an honest video review [Music] thankfully ameribraid has a full assembly video on their website and youtube just queued up on your phone while you're putting this together it was much easier to put together than i thought it would be the truth is some of you guys can probably do this without instructions they do provide a tool kit and all the wrenches you need took me about an hour and 15 minutes if i had to do it again i think it would probably go over in about 45 minutes or so putting together the pedestal is first and these are the casters that go with it it's a great feature but it costs extra so keep that in mind you can get regular feet or leveling casters for it having a rolling pedestal is a big plus for me it reduces clutter makes my machine mobile and gives it extra versatility and a small footprint in my pretty small shop as seen here the fastback chassis comes assembled essentially and pre-painted or powder coated unlike other grinders in his class and i really appreciated that to some of you that won't matter but to me it's sort of a big deal one of the main reasons i'm getting a new grinder is to get something that will tilt horizontal and there's some options that you can use to make your existing grinder tilt horizontally but with all the other bells and whistles and cool things with the ameribraid system i decided just to go ahead and upgrade and spend the money [Music] the vfd that comes with this unit is top of the line and it's pre-wired so that's sort of a big deal for me too it contains forward and reverse options i don't really care about reverse i can't anticipate that i'm going to use it very much they sell single speed versions if you don't want a vfd my last advice is to save up for a vfd this motor option is their two horsepower wig wide for 220 volts currently ameribraid offers 1 and 1.5 horsepower 110 or 2 and 3 horsepower and 220 volt you'll notice they include an indexing tool to set up the drive wheel in just the right spot on the motor spindle for tracking it's pretty handy we'll talk about my particular motor choice down the road when we test it out their platen here has a rubberized wheel on the bottom you can use for grinding it's pretty handy and notice that i'm probably spending less than five minutes getting the tracking on on this new construction grinder it's really nice it's very easy to adjust the tracking oh this music makes me feel like i gotta talk fast uh the small wheel i'm just we missed the small wheel attachment it was extra pretty cool small wheels i'm very excited to have that we'll look at that more later [Music] look at this huge work rest this is pretty cool too i think this was extra this size work rest i think this was extra at any rate finally we have their water bucket that's a pretty brilliant attachment to go with this pedestal very cool [Music] well the music and the time lapse photography made that look exhausting but it wasn't so here's a quick recap of the grinder and some of its features and i'm going to highlight what drew me to this specific grinder pre-assembled and powder coated pre-wired tilting frame the pedestal and the casters it has the the platen with the rubber wheel i'm a big fan of the mobility of this pedestal but it's not all gravy these leveling casters are pretty cool they level very easily by rotating this orange knob you can push the pad in here up and down and lift the wheel off the ground they're very nice unfortunately the only way to lock the wheel in place is to extend the pad until the wheels off the ground there's no lever or switch or anything you can press to lock the wheels and then just instantly unlock roll and so i i don't think that's too cool okay so another little nitpicky thing is the drive wheel sort of right here the sparks come straight down the two legs front legs of the stand won't really allow my dust collection bucket to get directly under the wheel it's off a little bit and so i have to sort of scoot this over to get right under the wheel and back far enough it's just going to take some adjustment but it's not that big a deal again this is nitpicking i think what they should do is make an attachment like this with the dust collector um thing that comes out here that'd be i'm confident people would pay for that this work rest is so much roomier than my last work rest it's adjustable up and down and if you move it to its lowest setting you can set it instantly indexed at 90 degrees to the platen using this set screw as a guide so you just you know put a 90 degree angle on there or one two three block or something and then you adjust the screw up and down until it's 90 degrees it's very nice from there you can keep the work rest in the same spot and just adjust the platen to slightly alter grinding angles if you want to and then go back that's not something ameribrade endorses it's just something i've noticed hopefully that doesn't wreck your drive somehow as you can see when you tilt it horizontally you have to replace the work rest arm in the chassis after turning at 90 degrees and then flip it upside down another thing i'm already liking is these big aluminum lock down wheels they're lightweight they turn easily the radius is long enough that they have some torque on them without much effort and they lock and unlock and um everything's just smooth and um it's clearly designed ergonomically and i'm just really enjoying that right now thank you steve let's crank it up and steve what happens one of the things i'm already noticing is how dead on this tracking is it's really amazing i mean it's just rock solid it doesn't drift with pressure it doesn't wobble my last belt grinder you couldn't adjust the platen wheels in and out and it wasn't nearly the stable part was my fault i let the crown on the tracking wheel wear down over six or seven years and so that could be replaced but even in its heyday it wasn't like this i mean this just runs dead straight except when you go from forward to reverse you have to adjust the tracking wheel a little bit here by about half an inch or so i bet with some tweaking you know i could get that worked down maybe worked out entirely but it's just not that important to me you know i'm not going to use reverse and it's so dead on going forward i'm just gonna leave things the way they are for now all right this is the platen it comes with this hardened steel backing and then a plate that's replaceable on the front of that they bolt to the tooling arm back here with these two bolts um mine's a mild steel plate they were out of hardened steel so they sent me the mild steel hardened steel plates on the way i'm not sure it matters much because i've put some double-sided tape on the front of that and then mounted a ceramic glass platen on that there's a shelf down here that i've welded on here to accommodate the platen redbeard ops does a video on how to make this type of modification to a grinder if you're interested they also sell shelves that you can bolt on from the back to accommodate a ceramic platen there's lots of different things i'm not recommending anything this isn't a tutorial you do this type of thing at your own risk if this patent breaks free the shards could fly at you and it's obviously a dangerous setup the platinum is adjustable you know side to side like this and you can also go front and back obviously so you'll be flush with the guide wheels recessed or proud of them i put them a little bit proud which is why i'm glad i found this platinum with rounded edges on top they don't all come with rounded edges at any rate that's that i'm pretty happy with this tooling arm they're making a platen chiller of some kind a cooler i'm sort of anxious to see what that's going to be like all right we're in the horizontal position let's check the small wheel attachment this is where i used to do that work it's not that i'm not thankful for the drum sander and it's not that it doesn't work but you can only get aluminum oxide for these drum sanders and that grit wears very quickly it's very expensive and there's no way you know it doesn't grind down here perfectly level because everything falls off and so to have this horizontal flip with the small wheel attachment i mean that's just that is i can't describe what a game changer that is for knife making for me so this is a quarter inch steel this is sort of a half used belt i think it's probably half to two thirds the way through its life cycle but i didn't want to use a sharp belt because then everyone's like oh it's the belt or can't tell because the belts are sharp at any rate it's a used belt so it's not at its peak performance this is unhardened uh high carbon steel so 1095. all right so what gives i can hear this two horsepower motor at 220 volts slowing with work that my old two horsepower motor 110 volts or roughly one and a half horsepowers probably wouldn't have bulked much at hmm at first i thought well the bulk and resistance of this rubber contact wheel at the base of the platinum is just harder to turn than the two inch aluminum wheel on my old grinders platen then i thought no maybe it's the drive wheel and the back that weighs more and then my older one and that's sort of slowing things down i mean when you turn the motor off it just sounds like there's more resistance in this belt circuit right so it turns out no according to eric at ameribraid that is the sound of the dc motor brake in the vfd so we'll have to look for some more clues listen to my reaction when turning on the grinder for the very first time it's like i could feel the wind in my hair and i thought that was really just the extra power or torque oh my god so i marked my drivewheel with purple marker and then filmed it at 240 frames per second and played it back frame by frame on my video editing software it only takes four frames for one rotation one two three four one two three four so given the frame rate of my camera if each rotation takes four frames then the calculations show my motor is running at 3600 rpm now that i simply read ameribraid's website a little closer i would have figured that out because they say as much their motors are double clocked at 3 600 rpm with the vfd and i wouldn't have had to do this fancy math but how is a 1745 rpm motor turning at 3 600 rpm eric at ameribraid confirms that the motor's base rpm rating is at 60 hertz on 3 phase and that the vfd is capable of 120 hertz output which doubles the motor speed i'm guessing that's what this j4 jumper does you can see in my vfd it's been placed on the 2x setting the problem is that when the power stays the same twice the rpm means one half the torque ameribraid says they use a 4-pole motor for better torque at lower speeds and that the science says a faster belt speed is more important for faster material removal than more pressure with higher torque eric notes speeding up the motors is standard practice in the grinder world and the construction of the motor can handle that extra speed so let's go ahead and turn my vfd down to 75 slow my motor down a little bit and see what happens despite leaning full force into the platinum the belt doesn't slow so profiling looks like it's going to just hang in there at the speed i can't really stop the belt you can hear now that i've turned it up a bit it's at 85 percent let's put this adc rv2 pull flat against the belt and see what happens i think you heard that it slowed a bit so i'm going to turn the vfd back down to 75 percent we'll put the steel back on the belt and see if it if it slows down at all it's really interesting just turning the vfd down 10 means it doesn't bog down anymore that's certainly more surface area than i typically grind and i'm pressing quite hard on it so fairly impressed with that slowing the speed basically improves the torque such that it's virtually unstoppable i mean slow motion footage i took of the drive wheel for this test shows the motor was turning at 3000 rpm or 5500 surface feet per minute you know the truth is i can still run this motor at 3 600 rpm and grind a knife without significant slowdown if i want to if taking it to 3000 rpm means it's virtually unstoppable and i can dial speeds in anywhere in between that then i'm plenty happy with the 2 horsepower 220 volt motor i don't see any need to step up to three horsepower remember in all of this you also have to contend with heat i mean does it really matter how fast your belt is spinning or how much pressure you can apply before bogging down if in either case your work it gets so hot that it burns up you know i don't know eric at ameriblade did offer to change the motors out in vfd if i wasn't happy with the performance on this one but it's so superior to my 2 horsepower 110 volt motor now that i figured it out that i would never do that all right i've used this on about a dozen projects so far and i'm going to break down the pros and cons pros first chassis comes assembled and powder coated out of the box it's a big deal to me state of the art k-back a variable speed drive with forward in reverse that is pre-wired another big deal to me simple smooth horizontal tilting the main reason i purchased this grinder easy to dial in tracking with large economic wheel grips space saving mobile pedestal with casters you know byo casters rubber contact wheel on the platen for grinding on the fly love it so it's a just it shows some thought huge indexing work rest a nice selection of accessories small wheel attachment contact wheels surface grinders are available might we see a pedestal attachment for dust collection in the future cons now you asked for it con you bloodsucker you're gonna have to do your own dirty work now do you hear me do you it's my shatner cons this belt grinder generates more heat because it does more work than my last grinder i didn't take that into account i'm gonna have to do something with that extra heat i'll either try to fabricate something that i find online or wait for mirror braid to come up with their own cooler next these leveling casters they're just not it i suggest standard locking casters instead of these particular leveling casters which cost extra so just save your money go to home depot if you agree next the two inch square tooling arm is larger than most other grinders tooling arms so if you're switching brands some of your old accessories may or may not fit with your new grinder lastly the water bucket needs to be deeper and that's about it it's a great machine overall i'm really really happy with it it's less expensive with more features than its competitors it's made in the usa i've had great customer service and aside from nitpicking a few things i really could not be happier so that's it guys have a good one [Music] you

Channel: Green Beetle

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Id: MYowzWx9Fpg

Length: 17min 18sec (1038 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 02 2021