Using a 4x36 to make a 2x72 Grinder!

what's going on everyone Brad here and welcome to crash shop in this video I'm gonna show you guys how to transform your 4 by 36 belt sander into a 2 by 72 grinder now before I get too into this video let me show you guys the machine that I'm using today this is the machine that I've been using lately super basic I've just got a tension arm up here to change the belt actually I'll throw belt on so you can see so that's a real basic like three wheel machine so my my arm back here is just on a spring this is just connected down to the base and that spring keeps tension on to the belt so I can just pull that down and take the belt off and I can pull it back down to put a new belt back on this is actually just a longboard wheel I just got a set of them for next to nothing off the Amazon my drive wheel here is a caster that I picked up at the local hardware store so it's my contact wheel on the front obviously the larger the drive wheel you have the faster your machine's gonna go I don't have a variable machine motor so I just try to find the contact wheel that kind of had a bit of a medium size but what's nice about the the casters is the wheels are actually kind of crowned a little bit and that aids in belt tracking kind of keeps the belt centered and something else that I did to help with the tracking is I mounted these wheels on two hinges so they actually fold as well as the contact wheel here but if you can see I've actually got a bolt back here and this is actually threaded through the hinge so when I loosen or tighten that bolt it's it's going in and out of that hinge and it's actually creating a larger gap between the hinge and at the actual mounting plate so that helps to track the belt and keep it centered not a whole lot of thought went into this one it's just something that I threw together because I needed the option of having different contact wheels for a project that I was working on and besides the motor which I already had laying around I really only sunk 50 maybe 60 dollars into this it takes a little bit more more time and a little bit more patience but if you have that time and patience and if you have the resources in your shop to make a machine like this I would suggest considering this because having the option of swapping out different contact wheels just totally changes the game and the way that I am modifying the four by 36 today it's not gonna really offer that option sure you can take my modification and make it better or change it so that it can house contact wheels but right now this is just gonna be like a flat platen alright this is the machine we're gonna be using today this is an example of a very basic 4 by 36 machine on a machine you'll find it just about any hardware store but you know it's pretty versatile machine is nice I find myself using this almost every day for something but today I'm going to modify it because I've actually got two of them and it doesn't matter what happens to this one alright so I took off all that unneeded stuff we got rid of the table and that whole plastic dust collection set up in the front so you're looking at a very basic bare-bones machine right now and this machine has a small tensioning spring in the back with an arm so when you put this down it lifts about quarter inch 1/2 inch maybe and that's what gives this tension so what I am going to do is modify this machine to fit a 2 by 72 belt which is exactly double the length so what needs to happen is this wheel needs to be up here now if you take a look at the back you can see that tensioning spring up here and you've got this back here and I can see right here just how far this spring is actually moving so when you look at this top arm here it's got a flat spot so just reference that bolt in comparison to where this piece of steel is so now it's moved down here so if I want to add more of a distance here what I'm going to do is create a longer arm past this bolt and if I need to create more tension I wouldn't expect needing more than another quarter inch so that should still be able to move nicely in this mechanism so I'm gonna keep this mechanism in place I don't want to ruin this because I'm actually gonna be reusing this just to make this project as easy as possible so in order to move this contact wheel up I am going to be adding pieces of steel to either side and what I'm going to do is actually make my cuts down here below the mechanism that way I don't disturb it alright so let's make some marks that way we don't have any bad cuts all right there we go so yeah that's gonna be a pretty tall machine obviously we'll put a platen back here that way we have a flat surface to grind against and we're also gonna be building a table so don't worry this is not gonna be like some weird floating machine all right so I've got this cut and now I need to figure out just how long my stilts or extensions need to be to make this easier myself I'm just gonna lay this down and we've got our piece here and here is our belt so here are our pieces and we need to stretch this distance so originally we had a 4 by 36 belt on here and now we have a 2 by 72 72 inches is double 36 and because this doubles up onto itself the distance should be half of 36 which is 18 and we're gonna need a piece that yeah this is right at 18 and we'll make a piece that's uh around 20 inches that way we've got some space on either side to weld let me see how long this piece is we're at 34 inches so I actually need 36 inches if I want to pieces that are 18 and I'd actually prefer a couple pieces that are a little bit longer all right so 34 inches total that's gonna put our Center mark at 17 let me go ahead and mark this now actually we want to be able to hit let's just say 19 inches with each piece so I'm gonna make a mark at 19 inches going from either direction you can kind of disregard this step if you actually have a piece of steel that's the right size but I'm just doing this with a scrap piece because I don't want to spend any money on this project let's see here let's just take the 19 inch mark extend it to the right on this side and then to the left on the other side all right so I just cleaned up some of these edges for welding alright so I'm keeping in mind that I don't want these things to be blocking me from being able to grind plunge lines so I'm putting these in in a direction where if I cut material off to make room for grinding a plunge line on either side that I'm still gonna have some support on the back all right so let me see where I'm at so this piece of Steel goes down to about here let's see I have it all the way down to the bottom of this so that leaves me with about 19 and a quarter in length I am subtracting about an inch and a half of that so that leaves me with 17 and 3/4 so I'm actually just shy of what I want to be I could lift these up just a little bit but I feel really good being able to have the bottom surface to weld it to as well and lifting it up means I'd only be able to weld on the sides rather than recut some steel I think of what I'm actually gonna do is take a piece of this plate and add another inch to the steel I'm also gonna cut a small piece to slip down in front here that way both of these pieces are held together tight and equally spaced away from the platen all right I'm gonna cut some more steel up like I said before I'm just scrapping all of this steel this is stuff I have laying around in the shop I'm not spending a dime on this modification it is a little bit of a trial and error if you don't have the right length pieces of steel right thickness and all that stuff so bear with me here if you have the correct size of Steel for this modification you can disregard all of these steps [Applause] [Music] okay I'll be completely honest I think this looks a little bit ridiculous and I just loosely put it together I hope at this point you can kind of visualize what I'm trying to do with this I'm gonna add a nice big flat grinding surface down towards the bottom of the belt you can see over here that I've actually got a little bit of a distance between these extensions and where the belt is sitting so I'll have a platinum between here but I'm not going to span the entire width it's just going to be behind the belt so I'll still be able to use the edges of the belts before plunge lines it's just kind of loosely fit together but it's it's tight enough to where I'm just gonna turn it on real quick and see what this is like [Music] I've got real nice tension on the belt and the tracking is surprisingly decent all I did was just kind of dry fit these pieces together I haven't done any welding or really any squaring at all so I don't think I'm gonna have to do much because it's already riding pretty nicely I'm gonna get to square it up and weld it together and I guess after that move over to the platen [Music] [Music] all right so we got the extension all welded in place it went smooth and it is looking nice like I said before if you just had two pieces of angle iron you could have done this a lot faster than I did because I ended up having to create an extension up top in the bottom so it's kind of a four piece construction I'm just doing what I can with what I've got and as you can see I've created a little bit of a leg on the other side of the drive wheel well I just made a stupid mistake this foot that I welded on is blocking me from being able to put a belt on the actual grinder so gosh I like I custom cut a piece to like fit this took me like 10 or 15 minutes to get that on and the entire process I didn't even think that that is blocking me from actually being able to use the machine so I'm gonna chop that off and put a different support on I've got this like thin piece of angle iron and I am going to be using this on the side of the machine running down to the back so rather than having a support on either side I'm just gonna have this one arm here as well as that piece of angle iron running from top to bottom [Music] so what you see here actually is my first 4 by 36 that I actually modified and I put a table on here and a nice flat platen and this thing was a workhorse for the longest time and the motor actually ended up going out so I've just kind of had this hanging out for a while I actually had an old motor mounted to the back so I'm actually gonna be repurposing some of the steel from this machine to create my grinding surface on the back of this one alright I cut this piece of steel off of my old grinder and it was originally my tool rest now it's going to be my platen so I threw this out a little bit it's writing right at about two inches which should be great for the 2 by 72 belts so I want to get this mounted kind of right between the two pieces of steel and it's gonna be standing a little bit proud once this is mounted and in place I'm going to be cutting away a little bit of this material on the side just to insure that I can get nice and tight for a plunge line all right I've got the platen attached and it's looking pretty good nice and straight I just ran it with the belt and it it's in a real good position so I'm happy with that this is the table I'm going to be using the tool rest and I'm going to use this piece of angle iron that I cut to attach it so this is going to be slipping in like this and the table will be welded on top over that now before I attach this table I'm gonna take note of where it's going to be sitting so it's going to be riding right along this edge and right along this edge so what I'm gonna do is actually cut away some of this material on either side that way you know grinding a knife or using this I can get up right to the edge without having to bump into this material on the side all right so we've got the platen in place and we have the bracket that it's going to hold the tool rest I got this all squared up so it is a perfect 290 degrees now I'm gonna go ahead and put a belt on and you can see that's writing real nice right on the platen but I want to make sure that my tool rest is not too tight against the belt and I also want to make sure I don't have too large of a gap all right well there we have it the four by 36 modified into a 2 by 72 grinder time for the maiden run lately I've been doing all of my work on the contact wheel and besides using my little grinders I haven't really been able to use a flat platen with my 2 by 72 belts and now I can when I first bought this 4 by 36 it could have been more than a hundred bucks I've had it for two or three years now and I've actually got a couple other ones that I picked up at flea markets and those ones were about fifty to seventy-five dollars so it's much more affordable than you know spending two or three grand obviously the purpose of a two by 72 is to be able to swap contact wheels and you get kind of a lot more out of a machine like that than you would with a machine like this what's nice for me is I'm able to use my two by seventy two belts on both machines now rather than having to buy both four by 36 and two by 72 well thank you all so much for watching I hope this video was helpful for some of you I had a great time making this modification and I'm so excited to start using it now I have a machine set up strictly for flat platen grinding as well as a machine dedicated to contact wheel grinding if you want to start using two by seventy-two belts and you don't have the money to invest in a real nice machine you don't have the time to build one yourself this is a great option because it only took me a few hours to throw together and it's gonna be a real handy machine to have in the shop please leave your comments and suggestions down below I would love to hear your thoughts any modifications you would make what would you guys do differently I love the suggestions that you guys leave me and I always take them into account when I'm going into new builds or just doing anything around the shop stay tuned I will be using this grinder in an upcoming video thank you so much for watching don't forget to Like and subscribe and I'll see you next time

Channel: Brad Richardson

Views: 41,961

Keywords: woodworking, craftshop, diy, how to, making a, blacksmithing, timberlee tool and trade, bradley richardson, custom, make, woodcraft, modern, craft shop, project, 2x72, making a 2x72, 4x36, modification, knife making

Id: pBKV99qAEY4

Length: 19min 54sec (1194 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 30 2018