Brigadoon Considered as a Belt Sander

I found my ultimate quest machine nine years ago.

I had been seeking a Porter-Cable B-5 sander for ages. The B-5 was the first handheld belt sander ever marketed, and, along with the K-8 circular saw, formed the bedrock of Porter-Cable’s reputation.

I had a chance at one in late 2003, when I first got into vintage power tools. Unfortunately, it was beyond my budget at the time. I tried again a few years after, and it once more went out of my reach. This happened again and again, while prices rose sharply, in some cases approaching $1,000.00 for a clean example. I was beginning to despair.

My luck changed thanks to Paul, a fellow Porter-Cable collector. In the course of talking about our respective P.C. collections, he offered me a B-5, in rough shape but with potential for salvation, for free.

As you may have surmised, I took him up on it.

I went to Youngstown with my father-in-law to meet Paul in person and pick up the sander. He spared us a great deal of his time, allowing me to peruse through his enviable collection of Porter-Cable documentation, and shared some great stories about his finds (his collection is astonishing, to say the least).

The sander in question was his first B-5, too, and is a bit of an enigma – besides having some casting differences to any other known example, it has an anachronistic tag. The original B-5, an aluminum handled affair, was made for only two years before it was realized that sanding conductive materials with an all-metal power tool greatly increased the chance of shock. The type two seen here used a maple handle that would go on to be seen on Porter-Cable machines as late as the 1990s. Our example, however, still bears the earlier 1926 tag, which mentions patents pending and has no model number (at the time, there was no need to mention the model, as there was no other model of handheld belt sander made, by anyone). I imagine someone at the factory stumbled across some old tags and chose to use them up, making this uncommon fellow even rarer.

After we took up a goodly portion of his afternoon, we departed with this,

the most beautiful sander in the world, if you ask me.

The years (and former users) had not been kind to the B-5. The brass gear was stripped, the switch plate was missing, a former owner nearly cut it in half with a poorly tracked belt (or ten), and a mending plate had been added, with a mounting bolt right through the tag. When that didn’t work, welding repairs had been done without dismantling the sander, so it melted part of the tag and finished cooking the insulation of the field and armature. Oh, and they stripped out the front handle, the hooligans.

However, it wasn’t all doom and gloom; it had, as they say, good bones.

Some collectors would keep looking for a better example, but I actually enjoy the challenge of a trainwreck machine, and I get a great deal of satisfaction in rescuing these basket cases. There’s a silver lining of sorts with a machine in this situation; you have nowhere to go but up.

I chose to start the resuscitation by rewelding the body properly and straightening the frame once it was repaired. After that, I could address the other issues with the castings while waiting for the motor to be rewound and the gear to be reproduced. Farming out so much of the work was expensive to be sure, but a few tool sales and some judicious savings soon provided the funds. It took a while, but love always finds a way.

The welds were ground completely out and redone. Once the frame was a bit more solidly held together, I started bending the front roller housing assembly back into true. I’ve never been more nervous in my life than when I was applying leverage to the irreplaceable main casting in order to wind it back into alignment without cracking it in half; if it had let go, I think I would have thrown myself in a river.

Once I had attended to the ravages of time, I turned my attention to the poor state of the bearings. The sander was equipped from the factory with magneto bearings, a design popular at the time for ease of installation, and well suited for lower workload applications. These bearings were, of course, ground to hamburger, so the decision was made to modify the B-5 to accept modern, sealed ball bearings. Preload is still adjusted through the bearing caps, and no difference can be seen from the outside of the sander.

I also took the liberty of adding a full-length wear bar to the B-5 both to prevent future damage and to provide some structural support to the frame. This amendment replaces the small, rudimentary block of the original design. The vise grips in the photo are holding the wear bar in register while the metal-filled epoxy I used as a bedding agent sets.

Here is a close up of the repair; I had to carve the welded over letters of the name “Cable” out of the remaining aluminum:

Other than fabricating a new tracking screw, the front pulley arm assembly was an easy fix. The support arm is bronze, and, like most other castings on the B-5, has an inspection stamp. This, combined with the numbers stamped into the various sander parts to keep them together through the fit and finish process just goes to show that early Porter-Cable power tools were almost hand made, a far cry from the automated production of today. Not many people can say they have a bespoke belt sander, but the B-5, B-4, and B-10 machines do kinda fit the description.

The poor thing was looking a bit more dignified after clean up, repairs and a bit of paint. Some B-5’s have a polished finish, but this one wore a metallic paint job from the factory.

I needed to farm out some things, such as the rewinding of the field and armature, having a new rear roller bracket (the B-5 is poorly balanced due to the offset motor, so an aluminum roller in an adjustable bracket is used to keep it upright. At some point, that disappeared, too). A new gear had to be made as well, but once that was accomplished, I was able to take this lovely old sander on the first run it had been capable of in decades.

The B-5 sands quite well, better than the design simplicity and poor balance would suggest. I reserve this old sander for my finest work, and it still lifts the burden of sanding drudgery from my shoulders with the same aplomb it demonstrated ninety-two years ago. It’s easy to see why this sander helped propel Porter-Cable to the forefront of power tool manufacturing.