With a conical sanding disk, you can feed a long board through the machine, just like you would with a table saw. With an ordinary sanding disk, this would be impossible because the edge of the board would hit the edge of the disk. Note that you can use the fence, feather boards, and dust collector with the conical disk. By using the fence, not only can you square up the edges, but you can also sand a board to a precise width.
You have to make a slight adjustment to the table so it is square to the disk. I was afraid this would be a pain in the neck, but it literally takes ten or fifteen seconds.
The conical sanding disk can joint boards that would be too long for my jointer or my edge sander. My expensive stand-alone edge belt sander can barely accommodate this board, yet the Shopsmith can handle much longer boards with ease. And, unlike the Shopsmith, the belt sander doesn’t necessarily sand evenly, which means that your board could end up wedge-shaped.
The conical sanding disk is a relatively small investment and it will greatly enhance the capability of your Shopsmith, performing tasks that would normally require many hundreds of dollars worth of machinery. If you buy no other Shopsmith accessory, buy this one.
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