Sanding Belts And Aluminum

If you are loading up a belt with aluminum, you are digging way too hard with it. In all the years I worked in aircraft production, we never lubed a sanding belt. The only time we had a loading problem was guys trying to hog off too much material at a time. You could always hear them when they pressed so hard on the belt, that it would bog the drive motor down. If you have to remove a lot of material, use a very coarse belt to get it close and move to finer belts to finish, and keep the part moving as you sand.
 
Good info, all. Thanks. Luckily this is just one belt in a box from Klingspor, but I would like to avoid it in the future.
 
Ditto for what cvairwerks says about grinding belts....but since a belt is alredy fouled up...Ever try a crepe block to clean things up? We had them in the family carpentry workshop growing up and they did a wonderful job cleaning belts.

On thermite: Last summerI was talking with a rep. for a company that was going to upgrade the fume and dust extraction system in the fabrication shop I worked in and he said that thermite reactions weren't a concern if the flow velocity in the ducting remained above a certain rate....but I can't remember what his minimum number was.

A colleague worked in a shop where thermite formed and was ignited in the extraction system. They put a chain around the whole section of ducting and yarded it outside to let it finish burning where it could do no harm.

Quick tip: For preventing aluminum from galling on punches, the same colleague said nothing worked as well as WD-40.
 
Going off topic just a bit:
British Steel said:
... railway lines used to be welded by building a clay/asbestos box around the join, filling it with Thermite and touching it off - in about a second the aluminium reduces the iron oxide to molten iron, itself turning into alumina (sapphire!), once cool the ends of the rails have been melted and fused with the fresh iron. THOUSANDS of degrees temperatures. It's done electrically now, 5000 Amp arcs are a lot safer.
Click to expand...
I recall seeing what I'm pretty sure was a Thermite weld setup in use when Portland, Oregon's light rail system was being built, not that many years ago. There's also some kind of copper-based Thermite variant still used to make joints in large copper cables. The ground wire "grid" in a new production building at Hewlett-Packard made use of this method.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top