I have done a lot of pads for my own use and have used both. I have a 4" and a 6" long. I also have a 12" disk. I used the belts for years and had many "adventures". It is doable with a lot of practice but you are always working blind by the geometry of the beast. I would never do it any more on a pad for a finished gun. It is still the best for the rough mating to a new stock due to speed of cutting but extreme vigilance is need. I now use a 12" Delta disc for most of the work. Finding the right holding fixture is the key.
I use a third type of sander a lot and that is the pneumatic drum. I purchased a couple of NOS drums for a Delta floor model machine. They are about 3 or 4 inches in diameter and about 8 or 9 inches long. I have a small Rikon wood lathe with a variable speed drive. The axle of the sander will chuck up in a 3 jaw chuck on the headstock and a 60 Deg ball bearing tailstock. I put it in, tighten the chuck and then tighten the tailstock wheel and lock it. Once you use it and get comfortable with setting the bladder pressure it is a dream sander. For building gun stocks or musical instrument necks there is nothing like it. With the proper pressure you can hand stand just about any convex or concave curve, even compound ones. By its nature it will not cut huge amounts at a time, but that is generally an advantage. Think grip of a gun or neck of a guitar. If you first rough it out by carving and rasping, most curves resemble a series of micro flats. The pneumatic disc conforms to the overall shape and quickly cuts all those ridges down to the curve, but once it contacts the entire surface, it slows down drastically so that the pressure is spread over a lot larger area and slow down. The best thing is that you can do this with the stock place perpendicular to the drum and rotate the stock back and forth across the drum while you slide it along the drum. I have never seen it cut a dip or groove in a stock.
For tighter curves, I also have a set of drums from 3/4" to 1-1/2" and a 2" to 3" long. These are made to chuck into a drill press but I prefer to chuck them into a die grinder and hold the speed down. They can essentially final shape and finish a grip with just swapping to sleeves of a different grit. They also work for final sanding a new of replacement pad on a finished stock by taping off the finish. You can carefully sand the pad while looking at the stock. The flexible drum eliminates about 80% of the hand sanding if you go up to 220 to 320 grit.
The bad thing is that the pneumatics are ideally suited to a new stock (or a stock refinish). For a simple pad, I believe the disk is still the best.
Last edited by AGS; 03/15/25 01:37 PM.
