The B-1, that most misbegotten child of Ray L. Carter

You may not have heard the name Ray Carter before, but if you’ve ever used a router, you have benefited from his greatest work. For you see, Mr. Carter was the man most directly responsible for the modern router. Oh, sure, there was the Kelley Electric Machine Co., but their “router” was designed for one application, the routing of stair stringers. Ray Carter’s design ticks all the boxes we expect from a router in the space age, not least being the provision to adjust depth. It seems that Carter improvised his first router ( or, in company parlance, a hand shaper) from a hair clipper motor, gave it a base and handles, and changed the way dozens of woodworking jobs were accomplished. (few tools are as versatile as the router; the biggest limitation is the imagination of the operator, really ). Carter would sell his manufacturing concern, the R.L. Carter Co., Inc, to Stanley in 1929. Stanley, in turn, would make his invention in every size from the smallest proto-laminate trimmers to the mammoth 3 hp monsters that were so heavy they were equipped with a lifting ring. This lineup would go through endless permutations before being bought out by Bosch, who would continue using elements of this lineup of Carter-inspired routers into the 2000s, making it an incredibly successful design.

Not bad for a fellow who fumbled three businesses in six years.

See, several years earlier, our boy here developed a disc sander in 1916; this sander was sold under the name of the Pioneer Dustless Disc Co., a company that existed for about six months. This would become the Carter & Buchholz Co., Inc. , a teaming up of Carter with Louis Buchholz, a patternmaker. This incarnation would offer three disc sanders ( and possibly, the S-1 oscillating spindle sander) before mutating once more into the Syracuse Sander Manufacturing Co. Under the Syracuse aegis, this duo would prove fruitful, expanding into a number of machines that included a truly underrated band saw, several disc and spindle sanders, and the dumbest design of belt sander known to mankind.

There is some design flaw or another with virtually every Carter-designed machine. The BS band saw suffered the least from his flights of fancy; compact ( for a 20” band saw, that is), robust, and elegantly shaped, it has one main fault in the distinctive round table, which looks boss but is something of a headache to put a fence on. It’s a minor matter- after all, the utility of a band saw fence was but poorly understood in the ‘teens. Besides, the saw makes up for it in every other respect, being the finest band saw I’ve ever used, bar none. The D-1 disc sander is likewise a fine machine, only slightly hampered by the table being supported on only one side ( a defect corrected by Porter-Cable with the addition of a steel bracket that bolted to the table and an added excrescence on the dust shroud casting). The oscillating sanders got it much worse. While the S-1 has a worm drive oscillating mechanism running in grease instead of the tried and true oil bath, the O-3 didn’t even have that, the worm drive being external, directly under the open throat of a sander, and protected ( if that’s the right term) by a chintzy tin cover.

However, no machine in Carter’s prolific career was wronged by its creator like the poor, benighted B-1.

In my shop, the only known surviving example of this abomination rests uneasily, shorn of motor and stand, the table wrenched away, abraded, worn, and prematurely wounded by the inherent flaws of its design.

I was offered this sander, or what’s left of it, by my friend Craig, who got it out of a combination of pity and curiosity. This may be the only proper way to regard a B-1, and after a comedy of errors with the shipping agency that resulted in me dragging the remains into my lair on New Years’ Eve night, I had to agree.

What can we say about the last B-1? The sander couldn’t have ever worked very well. One of the worst mistakes is the peculiar system for mounting the table. Instead of the flexible but otherwise robust single trunnion, the B-1 had the table supported on both sides by a sort of pivoting bracket with fingers that engaged two sockets machined in the sides of the table. This in and of itself is fine, if a little weird, but the brackets are minuscule, being about a 1/4” thick, and the fingers and sockets are correspondingly tiny. This, combined with the proximity of the sockets to the edge of the table closest the belt, make it only a matter of time before the table is abraded away enough for those sockets to be eroded, causing the table to fall off. Of course, this can be somewhat delayed by cranking down the bracket adjustments for dear life, but this only causes the casting to fail around the brackets, making them tear out. I don’t have to tell you that a belt sander with a delicate table is at a serious disadvantage, but wait, there’s more.

The second major shortcoming of the B-1 is the idler pulley. Later sanders during the Porter-Cable years would use a pulley ( or roller ) that had bearings pressed into it; these bearings would mount on stub spindles that were free to pivot in a pair of bronze hangers that could move up and down in a cast pocket in the frame to allow for tracking. Simple, no?

The B-1 had no such frills. Instead, the pulley has a fixed arbor that mounts in two bearings. These bearings in turn are mounted in bronze hangers that have no provision to pivot. These hangers are contained in a pocket that is a bit wider, and since the adjuster screws are captive in a cast iron arch that straddles the pocket without being attached in any way, can be tilted from side to side. As a result, the entire range of movement for tracking is dependent on the poor fit and lack of fasteners ( although there is a small steel dowel to register the upper adjustment assembly). Not only does this promote wear on, well, every moving part of the upper pulley and hardware, it also means that a belt failure with the platen in the horizontal position will mean that the pulley, tracking hangers, bearings, and adjusters will crash to the floor, being held in place chiefly by the sanding belt.

I mean, why?

There is a third serious drawback to the B-1, as if it wasn’t already doomed- the motor is a direct drive arrangement, mounted by the face and cantilevered out into the ether on the other end. In fact, the casting that houses the lower shaft and supports the top frame is also the front endbell of the motor. As a result, any failure of the motor is catastrophic and requires some serious retrofitting to mount a different motor, which is why the original base is missing on our example.

So, you might ask, what’s the bad news?

The B-1 has everything wrong with it. Bearings are of no moment, since I replace them as a matter of course, but every bearing surface was worn or damaged. The table mounting area of the main casting is broken out, the table badly abraded, the top and bottom shafts ruined, the platen worn, the motor missing, the stand long gone. No matter; shafts are easy enough to reproduce, and my toolroom personnel includes a very competent old lathe and a milling machine that specializes in cutting keyways. The table? well, it wouldn’t be too hard to mill out material where the table mounts and fit a piece of steel drilled, tapped, and slotted for the brackets. The table could be repaired with a fabricated filler piece, the platen filled with epoxy and covered with spring steel, and the stand made up by having some patterns cast and finding an appropriate-sized piece of pipe. The motor would be a trick, being a General Electric 3600 RPM model, but they do turn up from time to time.

The only issue is that when the parts have been made or sourced, and the sander is freshly reassembled, it’s still a lousy design.

Luckily for me, the B-1 begat far more successful descendants, and I own six of them. The B-1 will someday stand cheek to jowl with its grandchild, the irreproachable B-3, a machine with none of the faulty DNA of its ancestor. I can’t imagine I’ll use the B-1 a whole lot, but I’ll fire it up every once and again if only to appreciate that some machines are rare for a reason, not everything should be made like they used to, and certain folk really, really needed to stick to routers.