Bolt-Together Belt Grinder for the No-Weld Shop

Belt grinding offers a lot of advantages for the metalworker, and since belt grinders are pretty simple machines, shop-built tools are not an uncommon project. A bolt-together belt grinder makes this tool even more accessible to the home gamer.

With no access to a welder but with a basic milling machine and an ample scrap bin at his disposal,  [IJustLikeMakingThings] had to get creative and modify some of the welding-required belt grinder designs he found online to be bolt-up builds.  The key to a cool running belt grinder is for the belt to be as long as possible, and the …read more

Continue reading Bolt-Together Belt Grinder for the No-Weld Shop

Magnet Implants, Your Cyborg Primer

What would you do to gain a sixth sense? Some of us would submit to a minor surgical procedure where a magnet is implanted under the skin. While this isn’t the first time magnet implants have been mentioned here on Hackaday, [The Thought Emporium] did a phenomenal job of gathering the scattered data from blogs, forum posts, and personal experimentation into a short video which can be seen after the break.

As [The Thought Emporium] explains in more eloquent detail, a magnet under the skin allows the implantee to gain a permanent sense of strong magnetic fields. Implantation in a …read more

Continue reading Magnet Implants, Your Cyborg Primer

It’s an Angle Grinder! No, it’s a Floor Sander!

Faced with the potentially arduous task of sanding a wood floor, what would you do? Hire a pro? Rent the proper tools and do it yourself? Perhaps even shell out big bucks to buy professional grade tools? Or would you root around in your junk pile and slap together a quick and dirty floor sander from an old angle grinder?

That’s what [Donn DIY] did when looking at the wide expanse of fresh floorboards in his new sauna. Never one to take the easy way out, and apparently with a thing for angled gear boxes, [Donn DIY] took the guts …read more

Continue reading It’s an Angle Grinder! No, it’s a Floor Sander!

The Mother of All Belt Grinders

It seems like everyone is building belt grinders these days. You might think [Jeremy Schmidt] is just hoping on the bandwagon, but you’d be wrong. He took a full two years to design the perfect belt grinder for his needs. Now he’s built his perfect beast, and we must say, it’s quite impressive!

[Jeremy] had seen grinders which can tilt, but most of them tilt the entire machine, including the table. He designed his machine with an independent table. This means the belt can be placed at any angle, while the table remains flat. He’s achieved some really interesting finishes …read more

Continue reading The Mother of All Belt Grinders

An Extremely Useful Shop-Built Belt Grinder

What’s green and black and used all over the shop? It’s [Make It Extreme]’s newest build, a scratch-built belt grinder. And as usual, the build video gets us in the mood to cut metal.

We’ll go out on a limb here and state that the lathe, and not the belt grinder, is the essential metalworking tool. That’s pretty clear from this build – the running gear is machined entirely on a lathe. But as central as the lathe is to machinery making, belt grinders like this one have to rate right up there in terms of shop utility.

You can …read more

Continue reading An Extremely Useful Shop-Built Belt Grinder