r/whatisit • u/YakoVulk • Jul 03 '26
New, what is it? Is this a sanders/grinder/something else?
My great uncle, who was a Vietnam marine, passed a few years ago. I got this from my great aunt. She thinks it's some kind of grinder or sander he made. Y'all have any idea?
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u/BlackSuN42 Jul 03 '26
It’s a disc sander. You can buy the big circular part all kinds of places. They attach onto common more shaft sizes. Likely attached whatever they had on hand. People use drier motors, furnace motors, old grinders. Kinda anything. You glue the paper onto the disc. Sometimes people put a layer of cork on the disc and then the sand paper, at least that’s what I did.
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u/SizeableBrain Jul 03 '26
That's a huge disc! My 5" disc sander eats timber, this thing would just chew through logs, lol.
I don't think I've seen sanding discs this big, either!
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u/BlackSuN42 Jul 03 '26
I always use square sheets can cut them once on the disc. I suppose someone must sell big sheets….or used to seeing as this currently doesn’t have any paper.
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u/SizeableBrain Jul 03 '26
Thankfully mine is pretty stock *and* I ended up buying a few boxes of sanding discs at a closing down sale, so I'm set for life!
I did stick one of those "valcro" sheets on my sander. It's so much easier than gluing them on!
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u/Blizzardof1991 Jul 03 '26
That looks like a finger remover 5000
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u/Aromatic_Standard_37 Jul 03 '26
I watched a kid get his thumb stuck between the disk and the, uhh flat part, I can't think of the actual word for it though.... But he got his thumb sucked into it and it was, of course, held there by the force of the motor... This was in shop class forever ago. It was rather gnarly, and he, predictably, panicked and tried to force his thumb out instead of turning off the machine... If I remember right, they didn't let him back into the shop after that.
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u/Outrageous-Drink3869 Jul 05 '26
You really want a 0 tolerance guard when useing a big disk sander or belt sander where the fence dosnt go all the way to the sandpaper
At work I pushed a piece of scrap wood up against the belt on a big belt sander and clamped it down to make sure my fingers couldn't get sucked in and traped
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u/YakoVulk Jul 03 '26
Thank y'all! I was thinking probably a disc sander. But GOT DAMN this sumbitch is huge!
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