I went with performax and have never looked back. Good running easy to
adjust machine from the start and its been five years now of pretty heavy
use.

Jim


"JGS" wrote in message
...
Hi Festus,
I have the Delta. I do not have any problem sanding 30-36" pieces and I
do not
use an outfeed table. (It would be a PITA with the Delta anyway.) There
never
has been any centre marking. If it does occur you can adjust it out. It is
for
finishing and is painfully slow if you try to use it as a thickness
planer. With
that said, it still makes dealing with your type of chip out problem a
breeze.
If I had to do it again, and there was a Performax dealer around I would
probably go that way based upon the general consensus in this form.
Cheers, JG

Festus wrote:

Hi, I lurk here occasionally. I used to post several years ago under
paintpot. I owned a paint store for 19 years, then got out of the
business
about 2 years ago & went to work for a former customer of mine, a
general
contractor. I finally got on with the Missouri Division of State Parks
several months ago.

I have been woodworking most of my life, thanks to my father, who
departed
when I was 20. I have a pretty complete shop, but have started to use
quite
a bit of quartersawn white oak, due to several planned arts&crafts style
projects. I bought a couple hundred feet of it kiln dried, but in the
rough for (gloat) $2 a board foot. The problem is when I run it through
the
planer, I get some chipping. I have changed knives, taken very light
cuts
and tried wetting it before running it through at a slight angle, all to
no
avail. The planer is an old Belsaw 12" 9103.

So I am considering a drum sander to do the final cleanup of the oak.
The
stuff I think I would use it for would be well under 16" in most cases,
but
there are times I could use a larger width ( I would like to build a
hammered dulcimer in the future, and there is always the occasional
table
top). I was looking at the Performax 16-32 and Delta 18-36 models
because
of their open end design which would give the extra width. But in
reality,
how well do they work? I can see 2 possible problems. First, how rigid
is
the open end design compared to the closed type like the Grizzly 16"
drum
sander? It seems that there would be a certain amount of deflection
over
the 16 - 18" width. Second, if I were to run a 30" wide table top
through
one of the open end models, will there be a gouge somewhere near the
center,
due to the edge of the sandpaper on the drum? The problem I see here is
that it seems that supporting the outboard material properly would be
crucial to getting a smooth top without a possible gouge mark.

The only other thing is the Grizzly has 2 drums which ( I think) you
could
put different grits on to basically rough sand & finish sand in one
pass,
but it doesn't have a variable feed rate. Again I don't think this
would be
a big problem, since it feeds at 11 fpm, which I think should be about
right.

If any of you have experiences with either or possibly both type
machine,
please give me your opinion on this.

Thanks in advance,
Festus