Tracking a Belt Sander

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Kevin, and on behalf of Expert Village, I am going to show you how to track the belt on a belt sander. So once you've got the belt changed, and the new belt on, it may be on straight when you first put it on, but what's probably going to happen is the different belt is going to have more or less tension than the other belt and it's going to want to move side to side when you first turn it on. So, what you want to do is you want to use this knob right here to track it. And it can go both ways, and it puts more and less tension on this front wheel, and can kind of make it want to turn a little bit left or right, in order to move that belt side to side. When you perform this operation, you want to be sure to use hearing protection, because that belt sander is a very loud machine, so I'm going to put on my headphones and we're going to track this thing left to right. So what we've got is we've got the belt sander resting on the front hand grip, that way the belt sander's not touching any part of this, so that when we engage the trigger here and it starts spinning, it's not grinding into anything and going to want to take off. So we rest it on this when we start it, and then we're going to turn this until we get this belt centered to where we want it. Okay, and on the smaller belt sander it works the same way. We're going to turn it upside down, we're going to make sure we have our headphones on, and we're going to track this thing left to right. So we start it, and we've got it lined up centered on the platen here that keeps the belt flat and lets you sand the surface nice and smooth. It's important to remember that once you've got it tracked properly, and you start sanding, to check it every so often, and make sure that belt is staying, because especially with a new belt, you may get it tracked right, but once you start wearing and tearing and the belt starts to heat up, it's going to want to move a little bit in one direction or another - so just be sure to check it because what can happen is the belt sander can start to move over and if you don't have it tracked properly it will start grinding into the actual housing of the sander and sparks will start to fly. So, obviously you don't want that to happen, so just check your tracking every so often, flip it over and adjust it really quickly and that way you've always got that belt performing the optimal way you want it to.

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