How To Use A 4x36 Belt Sander For Knife Making

what's going on guys it's Alex here so today I want to talk about something I get asked a lot about and that is my grinder setup for knife making this is a four by 36 inch belt grinder or belt sander I guess we'll call it and these things are not made for knife making these things have a lot of uses in life making but today we're going to talk specifically about grinding bevels because I think that's what most people want to know is why can't I use a 4 by 36 for grinding bevels and knife making why are these things not recommended and honestly I don't necessarily think that they're not recommended over the fact that I wouldn't necessarily buy one of these a 4 by 36 specifically for knife making brand new I think that there's better options out there for around the same price but if you already have one of these things lying around your shop or you can pick one of these up for really cheap maybe 20 or 30 bucks on Craigslist or something like that you can definitely make modifications to them and use them to make knives you're not going to be pumping out a ton of knives with this thing this is for your hobbyist knife makers somebody who's just looking to maybe move up from doing it by hand and I'll tell you one thing this is a lot easier than grinding bevels by hand now when it comes to using a 4 by 36 for grinding bevels you're gonna really run into two issues the first issue is the platen and the second issue is power now all the modifications that I've done to this to kind of help solve one of those issues is completely proof of concept I literally just use stuff that I had lying around my shop none of this was meant to be permanent it was just to see whether or not I could make it work without spending any money and believe it or not what I have set up here actually works pretty well and you can get pretty decent results doing it this way so let me show you real quick what I've done to this thing specifically the platen area and why this is kind of an important thing to do and then we'll talk about I guess the work rest and other things like that all right so the first thing is the platen the platen area is this area right here this entire grinding surface is the platen on the problem with most 4 by 36 is I think all of them as far as I could tell is that the platen the grinding surface area is significantly wider than the belt is so through a belt on here you can see how the belt you know the belt is narrower then the platen is and this causes a problem if you have a knife with plunge lines on it so if you have a knife with plunge lines you're not going to be able to tilt the knife to hit your bevel you're not going to be able to get those plunge lines this is kind of hard to visualize and you almost need to kind of experiment and do it to see exactly what I'm talking about you know obviously if this is here or this the platen area sticks out farther than the belt does how are you going to tilt the knife and get the clearance that you need to grind your bevel it's just not there some of these you can adjust almost all the way over to one side like this one I can adjust all the way over to this side and I can kind of get a decent I want to say decent but I can kind of get a plunge line on that side but when I flip it over and do the other side I end up running into clearance issues so the best way that you can address this is to put another platen or a secondary platen on the grinder now this is just a piece of scrap steel that I had kicking around on the floor of my shop for probably the past five years or something like that it was originally a much longer piece I just chopped the piece off that was slightly I think it's a slightly wider now it's about the same width as the belt and that allows me to get on angle on my knife and give me clearance there because I can adjust this belt all the way over to the exact corner of that secondary platen there now I was originally just doing this as kind of a proof of concept and I was going to go back and put a larger full-coverage platen on here but that kind of takes us into the second issue which is the power issue now when I have a belt on here there's no contact between the belt and the original platen which basically takes a lot of the friction away and I think it helps the belt to kind of slide over everything easier and I'm afraid if I put a larger secondary platen on here it'll introduce a lot more friction into this whole set up and take a lot of the power away than I need so power on these things is definitely going to be an issue especially if you're talking about larger larger grinds like this on thicker steel if you're sticking to smaller knives like these tiny little bushcraft knives or even you know doing a full flat grind knives like these they're powerful enough for that it's definitely easier than doing it by hand I will say that much I will take time though again you're not going to be a production Factory and grind a ton of knives using this thing it's gonna be for your hobbyist someone who just wants an easier way than doing it by hand these things are usually around I think a third of a horsepower I'm at least a two that I have are this is a third I have another one of these that I use for surface grinding and that's 1/3 horsepower also belt speed they don't run at a super high belt speed which you know that's kind of an issue as well I suppose you could get a larger pulley and put a larger or smaller pulley on it and up the belt speed but I think you're still gonna run into power issues when doing that all right so let me show you the work rest here I got set up so one of the problems that you're going to run into with and I don't know if they're all like this but I think they are is that this this work press is gonna tilt in the wrong direction now there's a couple of things let me get this piece off here this is what was originally set up originally cane they had this little nut on here and you could adjust this but it adjusted in the wrong direction so what I ended up having to do is remove this little handle nut wing that thing and you know obviously you can see that you can adjust it in the opposite direction because there's nothing here so I just took a piece of plywood I drilled a hole in it put it onto there stuck a quarter-inch bolt through it and now I can adjust it in the opposite direction and I can do a couple things I can put a washer on here and screw this back one to keep in place or what I normally do is just take a clamp and clamp it down like that and it's solid it doesn't move once it's clamped down and I can clamp this or I can just put a little nut on here to the angle I need a lot of times what happens is the angle is like right there so I can't get a nut in here to kind of secure this down so I'll just take one clamp and I'll just clamp everything together like that and it's the wobble here is just from because they don't have this tighten down but it's solid and it doesn't usually move it ends up being pretty sturdy and it actually works fairly well you can get pretty decent results with us yeah it's a tie ground this knife with it and it actually turned out pretty good as far as I can tell I'm definitely probably be done better but for using something like this something pretty crude like this I think it turned out okay now you may be asking yourself why go to all the trouble of doing this whole thing and why not just lock your work rest here at 90 degrees jig just use an adjustable bevel jig and you absolutely can do that and there's nothing wrong with it however that kind of brings us into the issue of the work rest itself this is just a piece of plywood that I bolted through the bottom and I can adjust this up and down based on how many pieces of plywood I have on here or I can even put shims under here or whatever to get the height that I need in order to match up to my little platen I attack and if I was doing this permanently that's exactly what I would do is I would make this one nice big piece thick piece of steel that actually overhangs a little bit on the sides and that would allow me to use a much better bevel Jake here much better adjustable bevel Jake and I would just lock this down at 90 degrees and be done with it however I don't have a big piece of steel lying around and I wanted to use stuff that I already had so this is what I use this is basically the only piece that I had lying around that will work for this because you want a nice smooth surface I have this is a nice piece of sanded plywood if you don't have sanded plywood you can just use regular plywood you just have to sand it down nice and smooth because you don't want a bunch of bumps on here because the slightest little bump on a bevel jig like this will throw off your bevel so not usually a good thing that's the only reason that I chose to kind of make this little piece here and do the whole opposite angle adjustment thing it works for me it might not be for everybody but you know for using stuff that I have around here just kind of lying around this works for now and if you're gonna do this on your grinder you're gonna have to get the spacing between this little platen here if you decide to go with a tiny platen a larger platen will give you slightly more room to work with which is probably what I suggest if you were gonna get a piece of steel specifically for this I'd suggest something a little bit larger maybe not the whole width but definitely something larger than this one because you're gonna have to get this adjustment right between the platen and the work rest I'm just using some plywood to kind of get that distance correct that way when I have my knife clamped here it's right where I need it to go now my platen is just mounted to the back of the sander here via a couple of quarter-twenty screws drilled and tapped to holes in the platen and used two screws and screwed it in from the back and then sanded or crowned off these screws and that's it I didn't do anything else to it so that's pretty much the gist of how I attached it it's very crude but it does work and if you already have one of these four by thirty Six's lying around can definitely work for knife making if you're a hobbyist if you're looking at putting out a bunch of knives every week this is not the option for you you're gonna want to get an actual life grinder but like I said I've made a lot of good knives with this and it still works so I think I'm gonna continue using it one issue that I have run into is because this has just been used so much as the one of the bearings is starting to go out I'm one of these idler pulleys up here which is something else I'll mention these wheels up here these idler pulleys are exactly that they're idler wheels or pulley is they're not contact wheels and what that means is they have they have a slight radius to him hopefully he come you'll be able to see this but they are not flat so when you're grinding anything using this idler wheel here this idler pulley it's not going to be flat so you definitely have to keep that in mind if you're grinding you know your knife in this manner or whatever you have to be really careful because especially using thicker stock because you can definitely grind this at an angle and then you have to go back in and flatten it somehow you have to hold your knife at a slight angle in order to grind it flat so these are definitely not contact wheels or they're not meant to to grind one people do and it can work but you just have to keep that in mind so I do think that these are useful to have in a knife making shop I actually know of one at least one major custom knife manufacturer that has a bunch of four by thirty Six's that they used specifically for handle shaping and for handle shaping they're great as long as you keep in mind that you know you have your top idler wheel is not necessarily contact wheel but it's an idler pulley and it's not completely flat straight across other than that they're great for shaping handles and I will probably always have one in my shop for something but I wouldn't buy one new I would definitely look one at the used market check on Craigslist at least in my area there's half a dozen of these things looking around for 20 or 30 bucks so definitely check use before you go out and spend one hundred two hundred fifty dollars on a new one so yeah that's kind of the modifications that I made to this particular grinder and it works okay I'm gonna stick with it for now if I start pumping out a lot more knives and I'm definitely gonna have to upgrade but for the hobbyist maker I don't think you can go wrong purchasing one of these things you can definitely modify it to grind bevels you can use it for shaping handles you can even use it for mild surface grinding if you want to hopefully it gave you some ideas and maybe some inspiration on how to modify your own 4 by 36 for knife making if you liked 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Channel: OUTDOORS55

Views: 78,587

Rating: 4.9295998 out of 5

Keywords: knife making, 4x36 grinder for knife making, knife making tools, knife making easy, knife making for beginners, knife making with hand tools, knife making cheap, knife making diy, knife making tools for beginners, knife, making, 4x36 grinder, 4x36 sander for knife making, knife making with 4x36, beginner knife making tools, hand tool knife making, cheap knife making tools, knife grinder, 2x72 knife grinder, knife making grinder, knife making sander

Id: sJgnPAjukp8

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 15 2018