Simple homemade tools for repairing dents in stainless steel tubes for boat rails.

[C-Bag]

Thank you for your nice comment, C-Bag

I have not made the belt sander. It's just a regular pipe sander. I've just made an elevation on the sides of the wheels to keep the belt better in place when I work fast sideways on tubes like in the video.

Regards
Olav

Olav I don't mean to derail your post or take anything away from your DIY tools, but I've never seen a pipe sander before. Most of my life I've done metal work, but not much having to do with stainless. I had to do some refitting of some stainless fruit guides on a fruit sizer and it of course messed up the brushed finish. I found out they had a special horizontal abrasive drum on a variable speed angle grinder that could repair the finish. And without that our regular flap disc's had no way to make that style of finish. And just like with the fruit guide, trying to do the repair like you did would not look just like new without that particular sander.

So when I did a search for a hand held belt sander I only came up with ones I was familiar with. Not until I went back and reread your reply did I notice "pipe sander". That brought up a whole slew of machines like yours. And the prices are staggering, the cheapest was almost $200 and going up to around $1500! So in my mind a DIY version of this type of sander as a bolt on attachment to my Makita 4 1/2" grinder is a worthy future project. If I was doing this kind of work all the time I could see buying one, but it's not something I do a lot of. But thank you for bringing it to my attention.