Thread: An idea for a contact grinder.

I’ve now definitively answered my long-ago question: can I grind a razor from stock to finished razor using my drill press and a drum sander?

The answer is: Yes. You can also whittle redwood replicas of the works of Rodin with a penknife.

The better question is: do I want to?

And the answer to that one is NOOOooooooOOoooOoOOOoOoooooooOooo...oOOOoooo....oo .

That said, I got about 85% of the way through the pre-heat treat grinding before the cut-down sanding belt disintegrated too much to use.





At the max speed of my drill press, that took about 2 hours on an 80 grit ‘belt’.

If I didn’t get sunburned while doing it, I definitely got swarf-burned from all the sparks. To grind flat like that, on a drum sander, required somewhat regularly having at least one arm in the spray of newly liberated metal.

(I wore a face shield and respirator and did the grinding outside).

So, I am now fully ready to build a real contact grinder. Just as soon as I have access to the waterjet again, and once John has settled on a design.