I bought this belt grinder as a kit from HouseMade. It was a lot of fun to put together, and it is one of my favorite tools; I use it all the time. I think it's my younger daughter's favorite tool in the shop, too.
It absolutely eats anything you feed into it, but you can do relatively delicate work with it as well. I use it to sharpen all my knives, and I can get them razor sharp. But it does a lot more than that: everything from weld prep to stock removal.
It was pretty easy to assemble, too, even for someone with my limited skill in welding.
Building it
Here it is partway through the build, before the belt went on.
At some point during the build, I thought I had misplaced a piece of tubing that came with the kit. I looked for it absolutely everywhere, multiple times, and in the end just couldn't find it. So I decided to weld up a replacement piece.
Of course, as soon as I did that, even though the replacement was working just fine, I found the missing piece sitting right where I'd set it, right next to where I was welding.
Afterwards (December 2021)
A few days after finishing it, I tried a leather strop on the grinder. Razor sharp in seconds.
Later that same morning I got it off the bench and onto a new plywood rolling cabinet stand. Well, it's off the bench at least. The shop is getting crowded.
