Who makes good abrasives?

[Jason L]

Just like the title, I'm looking for good quality sandpaper and 4"x36" belts. I've got a frankengrinder that  I repurposed from a Harbor Fright grinder. First thing I did was take the motor off and throw it away. It's a little faster now and more powerful. Once I added a new motor it made it even more faster and more powerful. The abrasives I've been using are all just impulse buys wherever I happen to be and when I think of it but that stuff lasts a few minutes and then it's done. I'd like something I might be able to use again sometime. I need belts, paper and some flap wheels for an angle grinder. For what it's worth, it's not all for metal some will be for wood and occasionally plastic. I keep them separate so that one is metal only and one is wood only, etc. I looked through the forums and found some information but it wasn't fresh so I don't know if the info has changed over time. By the by, typing "abrasives" into the search bar yielded no results. I don't work well with todays technology apparently

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

Check out the Knife making classes section, reference sub section, there is a suppliers thread. We buy most 2X72 belts from Pops Knife Supply.

I can't control the wind, all I can do is adjust my sail’s.
Semper Paratus

 

[Jason L]

Cool. Thanks for the info. I'll check it out

[Steve Sells]

odd sizes dont have as many options as the industry standard 2x72, but there should still be a variety of grits and abrasive materials available

[Frosty]

I believe 4"x36" is a wood belt sander, your selection of belts will probably be pretty limited. What have your web searches found?

I have a 2" x 48" belt grinder I took apart to make my 2" x 72" belt grinder and while limited there was a decent selection of belts for the old set up. 

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[Jason L]

You are correct Frosty, it was a wood belt sander. It's more all purpose now that I've tinkered with it a bit. It does what I need it to do but the belts I've been using are, in a word, garbage. They last maybe 10 minutes or so at full capacity then it tapers off quickly. like I mentioned, it's my fault since I only buy belts for it sporadically, mostly when I walk by them and think about it. It doesn't see a lot of heavy use. But I would like to get some quality consumables for a change. I just don't see a lot of information about it that isn't sponsored. I can't really fully commit to believing someone's endorsement if I know they got paid to provide it. I've looked on here but the info is slightly out of date so I was just curious if there were some brands that were considered top of the heap. I don't like using it so I mostly hand sand things but I have the same problem there. I used my angle grinder yesterday to sand an anvil stand that I just made and the flap disk lasted all of 5 minutes before it was as smooth as my brain. Again, cheap materials bought on impulse. 

[George N. M.]

Jason, my experience is that power tools intended for wood are sub-optimal for metal.  Will they work? Yes.  Will they work well? No.  This often has to with speed.  For example drills for metal have to turn at slower rpms than thos used for wood.  Band saws also have a slower speed for metal.  In fact it is sometimes hard to find a band saw that has a low enough speed to use for metal.  This may be your problem.  Look at the rpm of your grinder motor and multiply it by the circumfrence of your driving wheel (pi x the diameter in inches) to get inches per minute of the belt.  Compre that to the specifications for belt grinders designed for metal.

Also, you may be exerting too much pressure aganst the belt with the work piece.  I find that light but firm pressure works best.

Or it may be cheap belts. Ceramic grit and zirconia are best for steel, aluminum oxide for softer metals.

"By hammer and hand all arts do staand."

[Frosty]

HAVE you done a simple web search Jason? I just searched "grinding belts" and the first one I read looks to be your daddy. Search "Red Label Abrasives."

This looks to be a good one, a 24 pack, you can check out grinding with belts from 40 to 1,000 grit in a number of abrasives for about $40

Red Label was just one af a few pages of abrasive sellers.

I hate to say it Brother but if you want to cheap everything you're aiming for a long row to hoe, with little chance of good results. 

Frosty The Lucky.

 

[Jason L]

I mostly use sandpaper to hand sand things so that's what I need at the moment. I seldom use the belt sander and mostly use the angle grinder to cut metal with. I mostly hand sand because of my bum arm making it hard to control subtle movements with electric grinders. I mess up much faster and more often because of the odd twitch or I lose grip in my hand so I tend to work slower and powerless these days. I've looked at several sites but I don't know what the quality might actually be so I figured I would ask people what they've had success with so I can kind of hedge my bets. I see a lot of talk about the machines, the attachments and so on, but most of the people I've seen recommending products have been paid to do so. Since I know the folks here are knowledgeable and trustworthy, I figured this was the perfect place for suggestions. I'll not be buying from the big box stores anymore after the last belt I used couldn't handle smoothing out a radius on a 3/4"x4" piece of pine. The belt was smoother than the wood was after about 10 minutes and the seam on the belt made it terribly hard to control with the wood bouncing up and down. Didn't enjoy it at all. 

[Steve Sells]

what do you mean out of date? the knife chat wasnt that long ago, steel hasnt changed much since then, nor has electricity or belts

[Frosty]

You asked about belts for a 4" x 36" belt sander, not sheets. 

If the work is bouncing at the seam you probably installed it backwards. Even if belts don't have a direction arrow on the inside there IS a lap where it's glued. Install it so the direction of travel slides the work off the side above the one it's sliding onto. 

If your belt dulled before it did the expected work you were using too fine a grit. Rounding edges is rough work and wants large grit maybe not 40 grit but certainly no finer than 80. Once you have the piece shaped use finer grits in stages, eg. 40 - 80 - 100 - 120 - 240 - and so on.

Using a tool you aren't very good with is good for you, you WILL get better, involuntary movement will improve as you strengthen or build new nerve ways. Being able to rest the work against a platten mitigates a LOT of the shakies. I'm not very steady anymore either but the belt grinder lets me do things I couldn't before. You just have to learn to do it and that doesn't mean read the instructions and ask advice here it means use the thing until you've trained your brain and nerves to do your bidding. The common term for that is, "muscle memory."

One last thing, you do NOT want sand PAPER belts for metal. The paper traps the cuttings in the grit and plugs it. You want CLOTH backed grinding belts, the cloth stretches and contracts microscopically as it goes around the wheels and sheds cuttings so they don't load up so quickly. 

Using tools and especially machinery isn't about just grabbing whatever, hoping then asking us for advice. If you aren't going to put some effort into what you want it makes us feel like we're wasting our time. We have much better things to waste time doing like telling jokes, tall tales and sharing pictures.

One of the things I hang out here for is to pass on some of the things I've learned in my 71 years, I don't want you to stop bothering us, I want you to get serious about things we offer. You don't have to use anything we suggest but telling us you just grab what you walk past is a slap in the face in return for our attempts to help.

Hmmmm? 

Frosty The Lucky.

[Jason L]

Good information Frosty. I have noticed that my paper did clog easily the first time I tried lapping the sole of my plane but it was too fine for the job. I really needed to start wit something coarser than 1000 grit but I just worked with what I had available at the time thinking I would get better materials later. I actually got it pretty flat but there's still some to do on it. 

I did mention in my original post the need for all three types of abrasives but after I read it back again it seemed as I mentioned it just in passing. My bad. i work odd hours so I should probably not post things when I first wake up, it's just not as clear. 

As far as my unstableness (is that a word?) is concerned, it's from an injury so it won't ever get any better. It's been a long, hard road but at least I got to keep all my parts. 

I apologize if I seemed like I was wasting your time Frosty. That wasn't my intention. I just don't use abrasives that often and never really gave it much thought until I need some the other day and after searching around, I saw a few brand names but not much recent. I was just wondering what people's opinions were now. I grabbed stuff on the fly before but but I've been more or less disappointed in the past so I'm looking for better materials and methods. I'm also now on a fixed income so I have to cheap out once in a while. 

I do take every bit of advice into consideration, but I have to weigh it against how badly I need something based on what I'm able to do with my physical limitations. Being not able to do what I used to is the part that pains me the most, but I do much less these days, much slower and with a lot more breaks. A simple S hook that used to take me a few minutes can now take me over an hour to make but I'm happy when I'm making it. 

Again, I apologize if I seemed like I was wasting your time, that was not my intention at all. This is just one of the things I always took for granted because I never used it that much but one project the other day made me rethink that and I wanted to pick the brains of people who do use it and might point me in the right directions.

[Frosty]

Sorry, I was in a bad mood, watching too much news. I took just grabbing what was there when you walk by too literally. It happens and I can get stuck on a thought, my apologies. 

What I meant by technique on a belt grinder mitigating instability or in my case shakiness was in reference to using the rest and grinding against the platten they hold the work steady so we don't have to be so much. Make sense?

240 grit would've been plenty for cleaning up the plane sole, 480 if you really want it shiny. Most things don't need 1,000 grit to take a fine polish, that's getting into wet sanding territory. 

Sorry again for losing perspective. It's been a very ugly day out there.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Jason L]

No apologies necessary. I value your opinion, even if it might not be what I want to hear. It's easy to forget that advice comes in many flavors and not all of them are palatable. And I'm afraid I can get muddled from time to time so what I say only makes sense while it's in my head. Once out, it becomes unintelligible. The platform makes sense but I removed it and I think it got tossed out. It wasn't very stable anyway and I couldn't put it in the right place anyway. I mostly use the wheel for sanding curves smooth and the platform didn't fit there. As for the grit of my paper, I bought it years ago to polish something at work, I think it might have been a fence charger circuit board or something I was working on. I forgot all about for a long time till I was looking for something else and found it. Working nights now has my sleep schedule messed up so now I usually do my best thinking around midnight or so. Another problem I have is remembering what I'm going after. I've tried writing it down but I always forget where I wrote it so now I just repeat what I want out loud till I get there. It helps but not foolproof. Just the other day I went after nuts and fender washers and for some reason getting 16 nuts and 8 washers seemed perfectly reasonable so I had to go back the next day for the other 8 washers. I swear getting old didn't look this bad when my parents and grandparents did it. 

Thanks for the words of wisdom though. Someone always comes through here and often enough Frosty, it's you.

[Frosty]

I shouldn't have been so harsh, I could've said it all and been encouraging instead. Sometimes I shouldn't respond till I'm in a better mood, I've done that too many times without realizing till later. 

A good rest is important but too many machines don't have good ones. The one on my old 2" x 48" wasn't good enough. When I built my 2" x 72" grinder I spent extra effort to make it rock solid. It's really nice being so solid.

If the rest gets in your way for some operations they come off easy. I made the bolts and nuts on the adjustments the same size and keep an open ended wrench with it. 

HAH. Getting up to do something and forgetting what, why, where, is called Aphasia, everybody enjoys it now and then. Unfortunately some of us live with it constantly. I repeat what I'm after until I have it in hand, it USUALLY works. I carry a notebook in my pocket almost all the time. If I remember to write a note I forget to read it. It's full of shopping lists I forget to check in the store. 

There's one more brain thingy that makes aphasia worse, it's called, "the threshold effect." It seems to be like an off switch for transient memory. We all know long term, short term memory. Then there's transient memory those are ones that we'll only use once say getting a glass of water. we don't need to remember to get a glass and fill it once we have our drink so the memory just goes.

The threshold effect is what wipes a transient. The universe is full of thresholds and they can be pretty subtle. Walking through a doorway is an obvious one, crossing from carpet to linoleum is one, walking past the end of a counter, the couch. almost anything can be a threshold. They're transitions, or markers, or. Could be a tree, the kid's swing set, the mailbox post, etc. The only time a threshold triggers is when you're holding a transient memory.

How it works most often is, we get up to get a drink but getting up is a threshold and we stand there wondering why we're standing. Or you make it to the kitchen, stepping onto the linoleum blin it's gone, pass the counter blink, chair, telephone, blink. And we're wondering why we're there.

The brain is a funny thing, we can actually consciously tell it to do or stop doing things. A really valuable aspect of that is being able to have your left brain tell your right brain to stop thinking about a thing and go to sleep. Or your left brain (hemisphere) can tell your right side to calm down if you're upset emotionally. 

After the accident I read a lot about the brain and how it works. I was afraid I was going to be on manual control the rest of my life, I was really emotionally brittle at first but I'm slowly leveling out. I still suffer it though as you experienced earlier. Only a couple years ago I used to really go off the rails but hard as it is to believe I'm actually getting better.

I don't mind admitting I was out of line, too harsh or completely off the rails. A few of the guys let me know when I'm too far gone and I appreciate it deeply.

AHHH, I'm off on a ramble again. <sigh>

Frosty The Lucky.

[Jason L]

I completely understand and I take things as they come. Life is too short to worry about the little things, which I usually forget anyway. I've got a few projects I'm thinking of starting soon so I'll need more materials than I have in the past and that's what led me down this rabbit hole. I've started doing more wood projects because I find it easier to handle something that won't burn a hole in me if I twitch the wrong way. I've still got a few things on my to do list that I'm hoping will make things easier for me. 

That's interesting about the brain. I can't claim to know how it works, and in some people IF it works, but I know that I should have gotten the extended warranty on mine. 

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

21 hours ago, Frosty said:

AHHH, I'm off on a ramble again. <sigh>

Rambling is good for the soul, I do it all the time while concentrating on a task and it helps me to concentrate.

I can't control the wind, all I can do is adjust my sail’s.
Semper Paratus

 

[M3F]

Rhynowet sandpaper is top of the line. Expensive but well worth it IMO.

[Frosty]

It's an altered state of consciousness that lets your reflex ("muscle" memory" do the fine control on the work while your conscious mind just directs. Consciousness trying to "do" things is like having mid level management breath down the necks of folk on the factory floor. Being in the zone is a desirable thing in the shop so long as you don't take it too far. 

Yeah, Jason, brains are fascinating things. I grew up in Dad's metal spinning/ machine shop and you can't walk into a shop like that safely unless you KNOW how. I was working in it from around 8yro on. Safe operation is about control, you have to be able to control yourself before you can control Anything else in your environment. Controlling things that can effect me was engrained in my soul from as far back as I can remember. So I've been intimately familiar with the Zone for probably 65 years.

Sooooo, when I suffered the TBI injury and discovered I wasn't in very good control my "obsession(?)" kicked in. When one of my therapists gave me a book about it I started reading the bibliography which leads to more bibliographies. It's an exponential rabbit hole you know. What I remember are the working handles that let me control (sort of) my brain's functions.

Emotions are the hardest to divorce yourself from which is an imperative for control. It's really hard to be objective about something that really ticks you off. No? It can be done though even if you have to use tricks. Yeah, you have to trick your own brain to make it behave.

Frosty The Lucy.

[Jason L]

Making my brain behave is like trying to push rope uphill. I'm not sure If my brain was defective from the factory or if I voided the warranty by doing things with it it wasn't built to do but it gives me fits these days. I've taught my self to think of everything as a lesson though, so now I look for the lesson in everything, even if there isn't one. It keeps me occupied. 

M3F, thanks for the tip, I'll look into it as soon as I get a few minutes. The last few days have ben an endurance trial for me and my family but I think I see the light at the end of the tunnel. I just hope it isn't an oncoming train. 

[Frosty]

See? There's your problem, you're thinking inside the box. Pushing rope uphill is easy if you don't unroll it from the spool. <SHEESH!>

Everything IS a lesson and scary if you're paying attention.

Frosty The Lucy.

[JHCC]

19 hours ago, Frosty said:

Emotions are the hardest to divorce yourself from which is an imperative for control. It's really hard to be objective about something that really ticks you off. No? It can be done though even if you have to use tricks. Yeah, you have to trick your own brain to make it behave.

One of the most valuable lessons I've ever learned is that (A) emotions are biochemical responses to external and internal stimuli, (B) you WILL keep feeling your emotions for as long as the various neurotransmitters and hormones (serotonin, adrenaline, dopamine, cortisol, etc) are still working their way through your system, (C) trying to STOP feeling any particular emotion is futile until the process described in (B) is complete, (D) trying to replace one emotion with another is possible but only as a short-term strategy, as you are simply overlaying another set of biochemical responses on top of the first, (E, and here's where things start to get interesting) the human brain has the capacity to intervene between emotion and behavior -- that is to say, we have the ability to evaluate both our situation and our emotional responses to that situation and then decide how we are going to respond, (F) this capacity can be developed and increased by the continual practice of deliberate self-awareness, of recognizing and evaluating our emotions and objectively considering appropriate actions, and finally (G) this entire process does not get rid of emotions (which are a totally normal part of being human), but places them in their proper place and perspective so that we experience them but are not ruled by them.

[Frosty]

Sounds about like what I learned after the TBI. Therapists and councilors spent a lot of time on "controlling" emotions. TBI tend to make us very brittle emotionally. A term I got sick of hearing was to paraphrase "it takes time to let it (the emotion) dump from your system." I thought flush was a better term seeing as we're talking various biochemicals but nope "dump" was the official term so that's that. The refusal to even consider let alone talk about or explain the preference REALLY ticked me off.

Maybe it was a trick to help teach me control. They were all nice people so the benefit of the doubt applies. 

To add something to your statement. Emotions are positive feedback loops if you let them be. Anger and sadness especially. Controlling emotions are as you say being aware of what's going on and letting them go. You still feel what you feel but letting it go gives your system time to flush the chemicals.

Compartmentalizing helps so long as you don't carry it too far and block. You still feel the emotion but compartmentalizing allows you to step back and deal at a little distance. Blocking on the other hand prevents you from dealing and the feeling manifests regardless, usually where it won't help at all.

Emotions look much different from the outside than the inside. Combining the perspectives was very helpful for me, especially early in my recovery and still is. 

Frosty The Lucky.

[JHCC]

"Flush" is a good choice of verb. 

[gewoon ik]

On 10/9/2023 at 6:47 AM, Frosty said:

I shouldn't have been so harsh, 

Frosty The Lucky.

You left out on some good wordplay.