# Expanding Collet



## Fabrickator (Sep 8, 2015)

I bought a new 4"x 6" belt sander some time back from HF to replace my 20 year old Delta.  The bearings were squealing on the Delta and when I saw the cost at HF, I thought "how could you go wrong?".

Well it's a piece of s**t.  Every time I go to sand anything the motor stalls.  SO, I decided to go ahead and rebuild my Delta.  I had no problem matching the drive roller ball bearings for only $2.60 each.  The idler roller has 2 bushings that I found for another $2.50 each but they require blind removal (can't get to them from the back).  I know a couple of tricks for this including running a tap in them to grab and pull, drilling them thin and split them, or just boring them out.

I also remembered an expanding collet tool I made for removing the bendix drive roller bearings in Harley primary covers about 30 years ago.  I bought a simple slide hammer back then and made the collet to fit, but it's too big for this project.  You can see in the McMaster pic these are pretty valuable for the professional shop (nearly $1K set), but hey, who needs the complete set?  So I decided to just make the one I needed.  It worked like a champ with a couple of knocks on the slide hammer and it may come in handy again some day.  It was a nice little proect too.

Happy to have my cast iron, Delta sander back.  The motor is still like new to go with the new bearings.  I will recycle the HF version to the round file...


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## kd4gij (Sep 8, 2015)

Nice job. Now to put a bigger motor on the HF sander.


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## Stroland (Sep 8, 2015)

Your HF experience sounds an awful lot like my Grizzly 1/4" drill...worked great until it touched wood. New drill bit, same issue.


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## xman_charl (Sep 9, 2015)

*3450 compressor duty motor from hf.*

*Toss that disc sander part. Got a better disc sander for my stuff, from enco.*

*rpm is 2700 with the pulleys*

*been using it for 8 months, mostly for welding *

*sort of okdokey, but it works


Charl
*


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