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A thicknesser works by rotating a drum with knives to remove material from a board with one flat edge. The board is fed against the drum by a conveyor belt or by an infeed roller as shown in this image:

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Is there something stopping me from removing the knives, wrapping the drum in sandpaper and using this machine as a drum sander?

The obvious thing that comes to mind is the speed at which the drum rotates. For instance, my thicknesser has a fixed speed of 4000 rpm, which is too high for a drum sander with the same drum diameter (shouldn't be above 2000 rpm).

Is there anything else? I guess there must be a fundamental hindrance somewhere in the idea, otherwise, we would see many sander-thicknessers on the market. Lamentably, there are no such machines.

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    Interesting notion. Do you have an idea of how you might clamp the sandpaper?
    – Aloysius Defenestrate
    Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 0:50
  • 3
    The interior isn't made to handle loose grit, I'm sure you'd soon ruin your much-more-highly-engineered thicknesser if you did this much, assuming you could run it slowly enough. Coming at this another way, can you not see a way/ways you could avoid having to have a drum sander? While they certainly have uses, they're hardly ubiquitous, even in workshops built entirely around power tools.....
    – Graphus
    Commented Oct 13, 2023 at 6:53
  • @AloysiusDefenestrate I would try double-sided tape or stick-on velcro.
    – Martin Drozdik
    Commented Oct 16, 2023 at 1:42

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