I think it would depend on what you plan to use it for. I have the 24" FlatMaster and I am very happy with it. It does what it says and keeps everything flat. Dust collection is great and it's extremely economical with sand paper. The draw backs are that you have to hand feed everything and longer pieces and be cumbersome to handle, I have the side fences for longer pieces and they work very well. For the hobby work that I do it works for me.
I think it would depend on what you plan to use it for. I have the 24" FlatMaster and I am very happy with it. It does what it says and keeps everything flat. Dust collection is great and it s extremely economical with sand paper. The draw backs are that you have to hand feed everything and longer pieces and be cumbersome to handle, I have the side fences for longer pieces and they work very well. For the hobby work that I do it works for me.
The draw backs are that you have to hand feed everything and longer pieces and be cumbersome to handle, I have the side fences for longer pieces and they work very well. For the hobby work that I do it works for me http://www.braindumps.com/70-413.htm
I built the V Drum sander, which is essentially the Flat Sander with a wooden top. The opening will depend on the size of drum. Mine is a 2" drum and the opening is a bit less than 2".
The Flat Sander may only come with a 4" drum. In which case, the opening will be slightly less than 4".
With proper support, carefully applied, I have ran pieces as short as 3.5" across mine. Scary, though.
I faced the same decision a couple of years ago, the fact is these are two very different tools. The Flatmaster works very well at smoothing a surface and flattening a board however it is not very capable at dimensioning lumber, i.e. bringing a board to a predetermined thickness. If you have 2 or more boards that you want to make exactly the same thickness it is very difficult to do so on the Flatmaster. For that matter even keeping one end of a board the same thickness as the opposite end is a challenge, this varies directly with the number of passes made on each board. This is largely due to the fact, as others have already stated, that the a boards are fed by hand - as such the feed rate can and often will vary through the feed as will the downward force applied to the board. The operator needs to develop a technique, using body english to get the best performance from the machine. This issue is amplified as the length of the board increases. That said, I love my Flatmaster and would hate to be w/o it, as long as you know it's limitations it can yield great results. I have a review of my Flatmaster written which provides more detail, as soon as I have the photos ready I will post this in the reviews section
I have the Flatmaster and the Performax 16-32 (larger version of the Jet). I use them for two totally different applications. The Performax is for thickening wood and I usually tape about 0.015 per pass. The Flatmaster is a finish sander and I normally get about 0.003 per pass of stock removal. The others are right in saying that long stock is hard to run through the Flatmaster. The width of the slot on my Flatmaster is 2 1/8" wide. I would limit the length of stock to at least 3x longer than the slot.
Have you looked at the Sand-Flee? It is a smaller version of the Flatmaster that comes with a motor and a solid metal top.
I bought the 10-20 new from Woodcraft and consider it the worst buy I ever made in woodworking tools! No experience with the Flatmaster.
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