DIY 2"x72" Belt Grinder

For a long time now I've had an interest in custom knifemaking. I started to take the plunge a few weeks ago and anealed a couple of old files and started grinding, filing, and sandpapering my way to a handmade knife. It wasn't long before I realized why most knifemakers use a belt grinder. hahaha  I had bought a 4x36 belt sander from Harbor Freight with the intention of using is for knifemaking. However the 4x36 in it's out of the box configuration isn't suited to making knives, as I found out. In fact buying a cheap 1x30 would have been a better investment for knifemaking. But after reading Wayne Goddard's book The $50 Knife Shop and reading his chapter on DIY grinders I was inspired to build my own. Then I visited with local knifemaker Ron Duncan who was kind enough to show me around his shop and show me his DIY belt grinders. Well needless to say I was pretty well hooked on building my own after that. After looking at some plans I got from the Knife Network forums for a KMG clone I was left trying to decide what approach to take. I had settled on the design but how and what was I going to make it out of. The plans called for 1/2" steel but our local scrap yard is pretty limited in it's selection of flat stock, so the more I thought about it the more I decided on casting my machine from aluminum. Since I had 3 boxes of scrap aluminum sitting in my carport waiting to be used I figured I could build the bulk of the machine from that and save myself a decent amount of cash. So Friday night after supper I started working on the wooden casting patterns.



Here you can see the casting patterns after being cut out and initially sanded, glad I bought that 4x36 belt sander after all.



Another shot of the parts assembled.



After the initial sanding and cleaning up I used bondo to fill in the imperfections in the 3/4" plywood. The parts are going to be nice and thick and the machine should have a decent bit of weight to it when it's done. I had a bunch of 3/4" plywood left over from when I built my new workbench so I thought this would be a good use for it. Something I had seen other hobbicasters do was use letters glued to their pattens so they could put their name on their castings. So I thought I would try it on this project.



Here's a shot of  the other side of the belt grinder. Ok so I got a bit crazy with the lettering. hahaha  The were stuck on with super glue.



This morning before it got to muggy I went out and started clear coating the patterns. I'm trying out Krylon's Triple Thick Clear Glaze. I'm pretty happy with the way it worked. I needed a good heavy coat, especially on the parts with the lettering. You'll see why in a second.



Here are the side patterns with the lettering. As you can see I put the clear coat on here really heavy. The letters need to have a slight radius around their edges or they'll  tear the casting sand mold when removed. So I put the clear coat on these parts really heavy to create a radius. I'm glad it worked out because my other choice was to do it with bondo and I really didn't want to take the time to go around each letter. It would have taken forever and I'm a bit on the impatient side. hahaha



And here's a close-up of the side patterns. As you can see the Krylon seemed to do a pretty good job of filling in around the edges of the lettering and creating radius around each letter.

More to come later ......