With the work on the big canoe getting resolved, it is time to get some tooling set of for new work. After all the guitar making that I have been doing for myself I have reached the point where I received my first commission. Part of getting ready for that work is to complete this DIY thickness sander.

A thickness sander works great for leveling wood uniformly. It is especially useful for wood with difficult grain or working it very thin. There are many luthiers who prefer to work only with hand tools, thicknessing all of their woods with a plane. While I enjoy working with a perfectly sharpened plane, sometimes there is just a lot of grunt work to get through that I enjoy less.

Anyway, this particular sander is made from an old radial arm saw that I picked up at the dump. The pictures should explain it fairly well. 7" steel drum, wrapped with abrasive, mounted to the overhead arm. The arm elevates and lowers, the table has folding extensions, and I use a sled to pass the wood under the drum. The wood cowling is to protect me from the spinning abrasive paper and to enable the dust collector to remove the copious amounts of dust generated.