Craftex / Busy Bee B2269 25in Dual Drum Sander Review
A Canada-only drum sander. What drum sanders actually do, the open-end trade-off, and the Amazon-available alternative.
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The Craftex B2269 is sold by Busy Bee Tools, a Canadian retailer. It is not distributed elsewhere and there is no Amazon path to it. Anyone outside Canada reading about this machine needs a different answer.
What a drum sander is actually for
It is not a sander in the finishing sense. It is a thicknessing machine that abrades instead of cutting.
That distinction is the whole reason to own one. A planer takes a chip, and taking a chip out of figured, curly or interlocked grain lifts the fibres — you get tear-out no matter how sharp the knives are or how fine the cut. An abrasive does not lever the fibre out; it wears it away. Highly figured maple, burl, and short offcuts that a planer would snipe or eject all go through a drum sander safely.
The second use is flattening glued-up panels. A wide panel that will not fit a planer goes through a drum sander, and the machine leaves it parallel.
The open-end trade-off
A closed-frame sander has the drum supported at both ends and is rigid. An open-end machine cantilevers the drum from one side, so a panel wider than the drum can be run through, turned around and run through again for the other half.
That doubles the usable width — a 16in drum handling a 32in panel. The cost is that the outboard end of the drum can deflect very slightly under load, so the two halves of the panel end up marginally different in thickness unless the drum is set parallel and you take light passes. Every open-end machine has an adjustment for this. Set it, check it with a test panel, and take light passes.
The rules that keep it working
Light passes. A quarter-turn of the handwheel is plenty. A greedy pass burns the abrasive and loads it instantly.
Dust extraction is mandatory, not optional. A drum sander with no extraction packs the abrasive with dust in one board and is a genuine fire risk.
Clean the drum with a rubber stick. A loaded abrasive burnishes and burns; a cleaned one cuts. This is the single biggest running cost saving available.
What to buy
The SuperMax 16-32, linked below, is the open-end drum sander this category is measured against — 16in drum, 32in capacity in two passes, variable-speed conveyor, and an intellicarve-style load sensor that slows the feed rather than stalling.
If your panels are always under the drum width, a closed-frame machine is stiffer and simpler. The open end only earns its complication if you make wide panels.
What works
- Open-end design sands panels up to 32in wide by passing them through twice, from a machine with a 16in drum
- Thicknesses figured and highly-curly stock that a planer would tear out regardless of knife sharpness
- Variable-speed conveyor lets you slow the feed when the drum starts to load rather than stopping
What doesn't
- Open-end machines need careful setup or the second half of a wide panel sits a hair thicker than the first