Cheap Grinders Are a Joke! (Right?????)

hey guys Walter Sorel back with more tips for the knife maker today reviewing a budget 2 by 72 inch belt grinder [Music] today I'll be reviewing the two by 82 inch belt Grinder from vivore yet you heard me right 2 by 82 now didn't I just say about 30 seconds ago that this was a 2x72 I sure did so hang in there we'll sort this one out in a minute as always like And subscribe hit the Bell so you get notified that's a big one and to pick up my free pdf of tips about how to get started in knife making check the cards and description this is a relatively budget-friendly model from vivore the online purveyor of mostly Chinese tools the vivore grinder is aimed squarely at knife makers but it's also going to be useful for Metal Fab Guys Auto Body folks machine shops all those kind of folks who work with Metals the question though is at this price point well let's be honest does it suck all right let's find out full disclosure first vivore did provide me with this grinder at no cost but they didn't pay any sponsorship fee I don't get any affiliate money from selling them so take all of that for whatever it's worth let's start with the facts and figures to start with yes this is a 2 by 82 inch belt grinder that means it's made for using a grinding belt that's two inches wide and 82 inches long sometimes vivores add copies a little suspect but in this case it's totally accurate when was the last time you bought a 2 by 82 inch belt in the U.S yeah never this grinder ships with a few 2 by 82 inch belts but you can also run 2x72s with some qualifications that we'll get into later the list price at the time of this video is about a thousand dollars the grinder ships with a flat platen a 12 inch tooth rubber contact wheel a small diameter wheel attachment that will run both 25 millimeter and 40 millimeter wheels and a small work table the motor is rated at 1.5 kilowatts which they say is equivalent to a two horse motor the grinder has a variable speed control [Music] there's also a separate Transformer which is necessary to make the FD do its thing I'm running the machine on a 20 amp 120 volt single phase line and it works comfortably there I never tripped any Breakers or had any problems on Startup that's about it for the basics so let's get into the weeds First Assembly pretty simple thanks to the extensive one-page directions I mean in all fairness it is front and back assembly really was simple though one thing to notice don't do what I did and put this mounting bolt on with the nut on top it'll eat up your belt because there's only the tiniest clearance between the bolt and the belt once I flipped it over all was well quick timeout with gear reviews like this one today plus tips and tricks that put money in your pocket this channel has been helping you save money and learn more about knives and knife making for free here on YouTube for nearly 15 years if you've been enjoying all this content and you want to help those videos keep coming there is a way it's called patreon all my patreon supporters at any pledge level get plans to most of my builds knives knife making tools all that stuff that I make here but more than that you get the satisfaction of supporting something that you believe in and that helps you so help me help you link in the cards and description thanks guys and now back to work now let's attack the whole 2x72 versus 2 by 82 issue China may be drowning in 2 by 82 inch belts but I couldn't find any place in the US that sells them now obviously I didn't look at every place that sells abrasives in the entire country but none of the normal knife making Supply or abrasive companies that I deal with have them 2 by 72 is absolutely the standard in the US for this General type of grinder the bottom line is that you can run a 2 by 72 inch belt on this machine but not comfortably why let me back up on some belt Grinders each attachment contact Wheels platens whatever has a separate arm the vivore however is set up with one arm and then the attachments are swapped out of these two mounting holes on the end of the arm each attachment will require a different position for the arm in other words it goes in and out on that shoe and then you secure it fine however in order to run a 2 by 72 inch belt with either the flat platen or with the 12 inch contact wheel you run that arm all the way back and then it whacks into the motor housing and even then you still have to move the platen to the rear mounting hole which puts the front part of the arm in front of the platen itself blocking access and making it essentially unusable this is a total no-go it's fixable however my solution to this problem was to cut about three inches off the rear of the mounting arm I should mention this is an extremely Stout arm solid steel about 40 millimeters or 1.6 inches Square now cutting it off for me is pretty easy because I've got a metal cutting bandsaw but if you did your mods with a hacksaw or even an abrasive chop saw you'd be at it for a while end result though I now have a perfectly functional 2 by 72 inch belt grinder the dimensions are all a little tight but it works here's how you swap out the various attachments pretty nice 12 inch contact wheel the wheel is well balanced which is very important especially at high speeds great for hog and material as well as for hollow grinding and forming Palm swells and handles a lot of uses for it the small wheel attachment works fine too there are actually two little wheels and you just slide them in and out of this little mounting Gizmo you're going to use those for finger notches in the handle that sort of thing you're limited to these two sizes but they're rubber faced which is nice and so you know they really work pretty well the flat platen ships with a graphite surface pad which reduces belt bump and supposedly runs a little bit cooler it's a consumable though so it'll eventually have to be replaced and it's kind of mushy which is good in some circumstances but not in others anyway nothing wrong with it if you don't like it you can just tear it off and adjust the platen outward speaking of which mine came from the factory a little bit too far in so I had to adjust it outwards so the belt was running nice and flat on it all the hardware is metric so if you need to adjust anything you'll need metric Allen wrenches additionally there are ways of sort of jury rigging a slack belt set up including taking the platen off of the flat platen setup but there's not really a native slack belt set up here now to what I consider the biggest weakness of this whole machine it ships with a vfd or variable frequency drive basically a variable speed control which is great it has some programmable features that I didn't spend a ton of time figuring out it'll drive the grinder in both forward and reverse so far so good now it's not mounted it's just sitting there and more importantly this is the really big thing it's not enclosed in a sealed enclosure what this means is that in a grimy environment which is precisely what belt Grinders create in about eight seconds a bunch of grinding dust and metal particles will eventually win their way into the guts of the vfd one day you'll hear a little pop as electricity arcs through all that metallic dust and that will be the end of your vfd now I happen to know from speaking to guys who manufacture American-made Grinders that sourcing a good metal sealed box with cooling fins and all that stuff is really one of the larger component expenses involved in making a variable speed grinder so I've come up with an El Cheapo solution buying a sealed electronics box off of Amazon and mounting it inside that this will cure the dust problem but there is the possibility that it may start causing the vfd to overheat because there's no airflow now I haven't experienced that yet but I can't tell you how it'll work running the grinder at reasonably high speeds for hours and hours on end I just haven't used the machine quite that much yet I've also bought a sealed box for the Transformer just haven't mounted that yet but it should be pretty simple to do that speaking of speeds this grinder has quite a large Drive wheel the larger your drive wheel the faster the belt goes in this case I calculate a Max surface speed of a little over six thousand feet per minute which is screaming fast personally I wouldn't recommend running it quite that fast my guess is you'd burn out the bearings on the flat platen and the small wheels if you ran it that way even for just a little while now the big contact wheel maybe that's not the case I don't know but I'm not going to find out the vfd is infinitely variable from 0 to 50 50 Watts I do not know but I've been running it up into the high 30s and I probably won't go much faster than that you can do plenty of hogging even at that speed now snarkiness aside it actually has various modes so you can program it to go by RPM which is the way I'll actually run it in the future truth is whatever little numbers are on the front it's all just kind of random the point is that you want to know how much the machine will do at any given setting and that's just a matter of experience I can say that I really leaned into this sucker and ground pretty hard and I wasn't able to bog down the motor without exerting what seemed to me to be a pretty unreasonable amount of force on the thing as I said no mounting gear whatsoever for the electrical components now if you want to give that a positive spin it gives you the flexibility to mount everything wherever you want it but it also means some extra work and expense it's a little Ticky tack to me before I got my sealed enclosure set up I was mounting it using OSHA approved 3M green mounting brackets just in case you're the kind of person who needs your jokes explained yes that's masking tape okay so once I get everything stabilized how does the grinder work actually it works great it's got all the normal grinder stuff the tracking wheel works just fine it maintains good track just easily and smoothly and you can hang the belt off the edges for grinding smooth plunge lines without any trouble you can run it backwards without doing anything other than fiddling a little with the tracking no problems there whatsoever the attachment arm goes in and out of this shoe and secures with a couple of good solid metal handles there's a Pneumatic tensioner which is pretty stiff but works fine I didn't find changing belts to be quite as easy as on some Grinders but it's really not anything insurmountable there's also a smallish work table the table is not really a joy to take on and off it takes the previously mentioned metric Allen wrenches to put it on and take it off it's not super big so if you plan on doing a lot of beveling with a grinding jig you might consider fabricating your own table I put the grinder through its Paces grinding at slow speeds high speeds using all the attachments a wide variety of belts on this front it was really quite nice to use running smoothly stably the frame solid all the mounting hardware seems pretty durable basically you'd have no problem whatsoever making a high quality knife on this machine from a purely functional perspective the overall design is solid but not exceptional it looks like a design that wasn't made with a lot of input from knife makers compared to the very knife maker friendly designs from say ameribre Travis Wert some of the other newer manufacturers in the U.S this just doesn't have quite the flexibility or ease of use doesn't have as many tools but in terms of the core functions of modern grinder basically you can grind it on a flat platen or a contact wheel it works quite well so that about wraps it up final thoughts look let's be honest if you're looking for a pro grinder for knife making and you can afford an American-made high quality professional grinder an amera braid a kmg a warts a baiter any of those things you will not be sorry you spent the money they're just plain better but look everybody has different budgets this is a lot of belt grinder for the money you know it's pretty solidly made you get several different you know pretty useful grinding attachments it's quiet it grinds well basically it's got full professional capabilities but look everybody has different budgets I already talked about the boxes that the vfd and the power supply come in if you plan to use this regularly or if you just have it sitting around in a grimy shop the speed control especially is really going to need a containment solution or my guess is this will be dead sooner than later so plan on spend in a little more time and money on that same goes for making a few minor mods to make it work for 2 by 72 grinding belts now look how good is the motor how good is the vfd how good are the bearings only time will tell but as a starter machine or something that's going to receive light duty use I expect you're going to get plenty of years out of this machine so who's this grinder for to me you know it's a decent starter machine for a hobbyist knife maker on a modest but not crazy low budget it might also be a nice addition to the shop of a knife maker who wants an extra grinder to do something real specific and save having to change attachments or belts all the time finally it'd be good for light duty use in a small Metal Fab shop you know welding shop Auto Body Shop any place that you're grinding metal all in all I gotta say with all those qualifications I'm pretty impressed seems like a pretty good value all right guys thanks for watching and we'll see you soon thanks for watching guys if you like what we're doing here please subscribe and make sure that you click on that Bell so you get notified of all the latest videos want to buy a knife from me check out my modern blades at tacticsarmory.com dig in the channel you can support our video making efforts on patreon you know I've been banging away on these videos for like 10 years so I hope you'll show some love for all that hard work Link in the cards and descriptions finally if you're interested in making Japanese swords check out my full line of Japanese sword videos where I show how to forge Japanese swords as well as how to polish them and how to make fittings handles and scabbards Walter sorrelsblades.com foreign foreign

Channel: Walter Sorrells

Views: 45,513

Keywords:

Id: c61Nm2BiGfk

Length: 16min 37sec (997 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023