I have been using my cordless drill and sand paper to turn fiberglass ice rods down to what I want. What are you guys using to do this? Is there a better set up for it? I am hoping to find something a little fast cuz this seems to take quite a bit of time.

Robert,
Use a lathe with sand paper. If you have a lathe with the ability to spin at about 5000 rpm, you can be done in a heart beat. However, when spinning that fast, you have to be concerned with destructive harmonic vibration, so you need to use a few ball bearing rod supports to properly support the spinning blank to avoid oscillation of the blank. It is good to have a variable speed lathe, so that you can spin it up to the speed when you start to get oscillation and then slow it down a bit to sand as quickly as possible without destroying the blank.

I set up a dedicated lathe that I built to handle this very chore and it works very well. I made the power head the same height as my power wrapper power head so that I can use the blank rests that I use when wrapping rods to support the spinning blank.

It is nice to have a foot pedal driving the variable speed, so that you can instantly drop the speed, if you encounter sudden oscillation as you sand the blank.

p.s.
Since you are working with very sharp glass, be sure to use full length sleeves, gloves and a breathing mask to avoid inhaling glass fibers and the sleeves and gloves to avoid impaling your self on the glass shards from the blank and the sanding dust.

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The average power wrapper does not do a good job of spinning the blank up to speed, since usually the wrapper motor does not have enough power to turn the blank reliably and long term at the desired turning speed.

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You can use one of the inexpensive variable speed style drill mounts and a router foot pedal to control the corded drill at the same height as your power wrapper to do the job at a low cost. Use a drill that has a high top speed like 3000 rpm and you will be good to go.
Many of the cordless drills only have a top speed of 1000 rpm or there a bouts and thus make for slow sanding.

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This picture is a picture of the cordless drill power unit that I used for many years for chores like blank sanding. It was made from a $2 24 volt cordless drill that had been stripped down to the motor, gear case and chuck. It was powered by a 10 amp 24 volt power supply with a foot controlled voltage level. It worked for a long time, until finally the motor just gave up the ghost:

[www.rodbuilding.org]

Here is a picture of a drill motor power head that I found several years ago that was made using a drill, a few pieces of wood and a clamp to secure the drill in place:

[www.rodbuilding.org]

You can lock the drill into its maximum speed setting and then plug it into a router variable speed control. Then, use the dial on the speed control box to regulate the speed of the drill as you do your sanding:

[www.harborfreight.com]

Good luck

Hello Robert,

I am a beginner and just did my first sanding. I used exactly the same set up you described. My drill has 2 speeds and I used the higher speed (1500 rpm), which seemed to give me better result. I did notice the harmonic oscillation that Roger was talking about. Since it was an ice rod blank (30 in) and slower speed than his, the oscillation was manageable, but I had to be pretty careful especially when I sanded closer to the tip.

To me that set up was good and sanding speed depends more on the # of the sand paper used. I used #400 and #1000. I felt #400 was good. I needed to check how the blank bends quite often to adjust how I apply my finger pressure during the sanding, so I didn't feel that sanding speed itself was the limiting factor during the process. I would say that using #1000 from the beginning would have been too slow though. I used #1000 only for the final fine tuning part. I felt that the thinner the tip of the blank became, the more sensitive the blank became to sanding, that makes sense to me. I was sanding a carbon blank, not a fiberglass.

I will be checking this post for my education!

a drill works well for a couple of blanks no need for a dedicated lathe.
I do recommend that you wet sand them it keeps the dust down to near nothing and just keep a container of water near where your sanding and rinse the paper from time to time makes for easy clean up.
I do still recommend that you use a respirator filter style mask don't want that getting in to you lungs

The best day to be alive is always tomorrow !!
Think out side the box when all else fails !!!
Wi.

Momo,
I adjust the sanding speed by the grit of the sandpaper.

If I need to do a lot of sanding, I will start with 100 grit and go finer from there. A coarser paper will cut very quickly, so use the sand paper with a light touch.

Good luck

this is such a bad idea for health reasons..i just can,t believe any body isn,t shouting it down..

Ben belote if you take the proper precautions there is no harm in it. Which I am doing. My full time job as a welder has taken more of a toll on my body than turning rods ever will.

hi Robert..i just don,t think there are enough precautions except to not create these particles in the first place..

Hello again,

As Matthew mentioned, I used wet sanding method. The sand paper was really soaking wet.
It helped keeping the rod cool and completely eliminated dust generation. I kept cleaning the
sand paper in a bucket filled with clean water after a few strokes of sanding (the water in the
bucket eventually got dirty). As Robert mentioned, I don't see any inhalation hazard with
wet sanding.