I recently had to rip a whole lot of material
where a power feeder was a handy thing to have,
so I improvised one with just a drill
and a rod and a roller skate wheelie on the end of it,
with a block like this to guide it.
But then in the next step I had to actually cut the wood
like this and that contraption wasn't going to work
so I came up with this contraption which I could mount
vertically against the sacrificial fence.
This one actually has an adjustment knob
where I can adjust how hard it pushes down on the wheel
but even so this was slapped together other quickly
so I thought I'd make a better version of it
but I'm going to reuse parts of this one.
I got a bunch of different roller skate wheels here
and the question is which of these is the grippiest?
If I just put a piece of wood in between these two,
I can see that this one slides and this one doesn't.
But the red one seems grippiest of all
because this one slides, this one doesn't.
I have no use for the bearings in this one,
and these are really cheap bearings too.
So I have to mount that on this shaft somehow.
I roughened up the end of that shaft rather imprecisely
and now I need a slightly undersized hole
in the block of wood.
And now I just need to make this fit on the wheel
The last little bit just broke off from fitting this
over and over again but overall
this works pretty good. Now I just need to
screw it on somehow.
So this is my new drive wheel which hopefully is even grippier
than the old one. And in the old one
I just have the shaft going into the slot
where I can move up and down. And then this part here
just pressed it down. It all runs at very low speed
so this hasn't been a problem but I think it would be better
if the shaft actually just turned in a hole
and that part moved up and down instead of a slot in this part.
I drilled that a little bit oversized and even tilted it
on the drill because as this part moves up and down,
it has to pivot in the hole. Now to push this down,
I'm figuring to have this carriage pulled in here like that
and that will give me lots of range of adjustment
for how high this goes. I just need a slot right here.
This block is gonna pivot like this
and I'll put the pivot hole right here.
It's gonna pivot against this block here.
And I want that screw hole right about here.
I can barely see that mark.
So that gives me a reasonable range of adjustment.
Now ideally I have this sticking out a fair bit here.
And I will just reuse the washers and the spacers
I made for the last one.
And I've polished this part of the shaft already
so that it runs smoothly in the hole.
And I was just thinking actually a little bit more overhang
like this would be better. So I made a longer spacer
out of hardwood. Put that in here like that.
So now with this going up and down,
I want to have a pivot for this shaft here so I'm not
stressing out the drill chuck here.
And I need to have enough room for the drill
even if this is all the way up.
So that means I should pivot right about here,
like this.
So these holes need to be quite slack
so that this shaft can tilt by quite a lot.
Now I don't want this part falling out
when there's no drill attached so I'm going to put
a couple of washers in here and I made this little collar
for the last one and then just reusing that
and there's a couple of screws on there that make it tight
on the shaft.
Now I got to decide which of these drills
I'm going to optimize it for. These are both brushless drills
and they both regulate the speed very well even at low speeds
so if I just push the trigger down a little bit
and then grab the chuck,
it just really cranks up the power
because both of these have a little computer inside,
whereas a drill like this, if I run it very slow,
and then grab the chuck,
it has no power at all. And the other advantage
of these brushless drills is they're very efficient
at low speeds. So this one
I started it with this battery pack not even freshly charged
and I did over 300 feet of baseboard with that,
running it through many times, hours on end running,
drill never got warm and only towards the end
did I drain the battery. So if you try to do that
with one of these drills even if you solve the speed problem
they're inefficient at low speed you drain the battery,
you probably burn out the drill because you don't cool very well
at low speeds. With these ones
it doesn't matter because they're so efficient,
they hardly need any cooling when they're running very slow.
Now this drill has this annoying habit,
if you push the trigger straight for probably about five minutes,
it just stops, I don't know if this one has the same problem
so I'm gonna do a test.
Okay, that was about five minutes for this one.
Let's see how long this one goes.
So it's now been ten minutes and this one's still going,
so I'm guessing that this one doesn't have
this anti-easy feature.
And the air blowing out of it is still cool
so I'm pretty sure this one is also very efficient at low speed
although I would have probably preferred to use this one
for the motor for my power feeder because I don't actually
like using this as a drill, it's just way too big and heavy.
Now I need something to keep the drill
from flipping over like this if it's turning in that direction
so I'm just gonna reuse this part that I made for the old one
and screw it on right here.
One thing that was annoying with using this drill is every time
I turn it on I had to set my speed again,
which is why I made this clamp here and on that one,
I can set what speed I want on it
and I just put that on there and I have my speed
and if I want it off, I take it off and then if I
to put it back on I have the same speed again.
The only thing left to do is to try it out.
I don't actually want the wheel to come down this far
so I'm just gonna stick a lock in here.
And I still get some coupling that way.
Oops.
Unfortunately this drill, at the lowest speeds,
has a bit of waviness with how it runs.
That can be bad, let's see how it does with the cove cut.
Not as bad as I thought it would be.
Let's give it a few more passes.
Well it is very consistent but not a finished surface.
And after a minute of hand sanding, it feels really smooth
and the cut marks are just about gone.
You can still see some right here.
So that's my simple minimal homemade power feeder.
I could, of course, try to make something more sophisticated
with two rollers so I could have an in-feed and an out-feed roller
or something with a gear head motor
and a whole bunch of wooden gears to reduce it
to the right speed but I don't need a power feeder very often
and I think this will serve me just fine.
Oh, and one more thing on my first one I put the shaft in here
at a slight angle so that as I feed material like this
it pushes it away towards the fence.
Well the problem is I realized that was counterproductive
because half the time I was feeding it this way
depending on what tool I was using so it makes much more sense
to have this shaft in straight and just angle
the whole power feeder to force it against the fence.