![]() Sanding with random orbit sander? You should see little tiny circular squiggles all over the surface. Sanding by hand with a stiff backing block? You should see deep, straight scratches. The success in using this trick is rooted in the simple premise that you should hopefully know the direction and shape of the scratches that you’re putting in the wood. Just take care that sanding directly perpendicular to the grain by hand puts some serious scratches in the wood that will be very hard to get out with a finer grit-a better solution would be to sand at a slight left-hand or right-hand angle from the grain, and not to cut directly across the grain. For example you could sand the first grit by hand, parallel to the wood grain, and then the second grit could be with a random orbit sander, and so forth. While it’s not always the best (or most efficient) method in all circumstances, using varying sanding techniques can be invaluable if it seems like you’re running into repetitive sanding flaws in your work, and you’re just not sure where they’re coming from. Use alternating sanding techniques to find where (and at what grit) you’re having problems Once the dust is out, hold the piece up to a light (or bring a light to the work-piece if it’s something larger), and view the surface at a very low angle-almost parallel with the surface-to try and spot any serious/errant scratches. A can of compressed air or an air compressor can also blow the dust out, but it also creates a cloud of dust in the air. To check, wipe all the sanding dust from the surface of the wood-I like to use a microfiber towel that can “grab” the dust right out of the pores and scratches of the wood. Nothing’s worse than going through all the grits only to find that you still have some 60 grit scratches left in the wood from the very first step. But when you’re first starting out, anything that possibly can go wrong probably will go wrong: and nowhere is this more apparent than in the sanding. It’s not enough to just feel the wood or take a casual look and think “that’s probably good enough.” Sure, pros can sometimes get away with this lackadaisical approach because they have years of experience. ![]() Learn how to inspect your sanding job between each grit Once a finish (and especially if a stain is applied) the sanding scratches will become all that much more noticeable and pronounced. You want to fix sanding mistakes before they’re embedded (and accented) under a few thousandths of an inch of pigments, dyes, and resins. ![]() The resulting surface my feel smooth to the touch, and may even look good from a distance with casual examination, but the proof is in the pudding, as they say. The wood is either given a quick, insufficient sanding or else, if it is sanded to a finer grit, it is done haphazardly, and while skipping grits. Insufficient or poor sanding is a classic mistake common to a lot of beginning woodworkers. So when you make coarse scratches in a wood surface-say, for instance, 60 or 80 grit-the fastest way to remove those scratches is with a medium grit: too large a grit (only slightly finer than the paper in your previous step), and you’ll be adding needless work but too fine a grit, and you could sand for hours and still not remove the deep scratches. Then you’ll realize, especially if you value your time, that getting the right sandpaper definitely isn’t too expensive: it’s well worth it.īasically, you are putting successively smaller and smaller scratches in the wood until, ultimately, the scratches become so small that they are “invisible” to the naked eye. If you’re just starting out, and you’re put off by the apparent large price of all those different grits of sandpaper, I’d highly recommend buying a variety pack that has a few sheets of each grit included. Differing grits of sandpaper are meant to save you time, not waste it. Can you spot the cross-grain sanding scratches? I see this every night because this is my own nightstand made 10+ years ago. “Nonsense,” I thought, “I’ll just use some 60 grit to get out the larger defects, and then some 220 to smooth things out.” As it turned out, I was the chump. In my very earliest days of woodworking, I used to think that sanding through all the different grits of sandpaper was for anal-retentive chumps.
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