Belt Sander Racing - Where Beer and Power Tools Mix

As is the case with any popular vacation spot, the locals in this Texas coastal town spend their lives blending into the background while tourists rule the roost.

But every two weeks, a boisterous crowd of 150 - retirees, eccentrics, and working class heroes - gather in the shaded beer garden of the Gaff, a townie-friendly bar sitting a few blocks from the water. And there, they champion two activities that, for safety reasons, don't usually mix - drinking beer while operating power tools. Racing belt sanders is a guerilla sport that's ostensibly about winning, but which is a social gathering occasionally drowned out by construction noise.

A belt sander is a hand tool, roughly the size of a small bread loaf, used to smooth large swaths of surface wood. The sander uses an endless abrasive belt and is powered by an internal electric motor. The precise origin of belt sander racing isn't known, but it's believed to have started in the Boston area, among local woodworkers, more than 30 years ago.

The story, related by Dave Kenyon of Jamaica Plains, Massachusetts - a woodworker who helped shape and popularize this form of facing - is that a craftsman absentmindedly put his belt sander down while it was still running.

The sander took off. That night, the legend goes, that guy told drinking buddies about the incident. After several beers, someone suggested that they could race belt sanders. Ideas hatched in bars are usually bad, but in this case, a sport was born. Word reached Kenyon. He and friends fleshed out the details of belt sander racing best practices.

A sander needs modification to race. After trial and error, Kenyon's group figured out they had to remove the cooling fan because it used too much power. They replaced internal gears with bigger ones. A newer, thicker rubber drive belt replaced the factory version. They also swapped out the big and small flywheels that move the belt to improve speed.

The best sandpaper to use, I was told at the Gaff, is "the grittiest you can find." It's also good to rough it up a bit to give it better grip. The standard race track is a 75-foot-long straightaway, equipped with wooden barriers. Racers can be battery-powered or run with extension cords. Depending on the motor, Gaff owner Kip Shannon said, a belt sander can cover 75 feet in anywhere from 3 to 5 seconds.

Woodworkers and hipsters were racing every few weeks at Kenyon's studio. It sits next to the Samuel Adams brewery, which provided free beer as soon as plant management heard about the races. That was how belt sander racing became associated with beer drinking.