Speed: 1725 RPM.
Belt: 2″ wide x 72″–76″ long x 2″ thic.
A conveyor belt moves at 3600 FPM.
The left arbor has an 8-1/2″ extension with a 5/8″ arbor on the left side.
The motor is 1 HP, 110V, single-phase, 14A.
In the end, I decided that I wanted to make knives for fun, but my Grizzly 1×30 belt grinder wasn’t going to do the job any more. In my search for an upgrade, I found out that 2×72 Grinders aren’t cheap at all, they’re actually really, really pricey. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I had outgrown the 1×30 ($135 USD). I was sure I wasn’t ready to spend 2-3k on a professional grinder. That narrowed the field a lot, and this Grizz became the only really good sub-$1000 option. I bought the grinder for about 650 dollars at the time. Most of the reviews and blog posts I found on this grinder were mixed at best, and while these reviews were quick to point out the big and sometimes impossible problems with this tool, I was never deterred. A few reviewers said that they had problems with the way the game worked. I thought I wasn’t smart enough to deal with them for a long time. It’s been several years and several months since I bought one of those professional grinders that were too expensive before. I can say that I was right for a while, but then, so were the reviews.
People who had good things to say about the new 1×30 started to come back to bite them. The belts lasted a lot longer and this ground knives much more quickly.
2) The work is done. Funny, this is true, but a trip to Home Depot and a little imagination fixed that.
In this case, you could just buy a new motor.
It’s important to note that there is only one speed (very fast). This made it hard to get the grinds right.
4) This was the most important flaw. The tracking is terrible. The belt was all over the place, and this was true for both 2 dollar belts and 30 dollar belts. Tracking was terrible, which made it difficult to get the plunge lines in place as the belt moved around and was inconsistent left to right. There was nothing that could be done about this.
So, in hindsight, I could have made much better work sooner if I had skipped a step and gone straight to the professional grinder in the first place. I would also have saved money by not buying the Grizzly, which now takes up space in my shop.
