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Hicksy!!! c’mon man! 60?!!! Last week we rode a board across the parking lot, doing run-and-jumps; that’s about 60 grit. (okay, consider yourself raked now;)
Well, it’s not that bad in an orbital or even a random orbit, but… Me, I use a lot of 80 in the variable speed Milwaukee, for sanding away munched stuff in dings and grinding away paint on boat work.
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We start with 150 and use 6 papers in three subsequent grits. We then burnish with a half-sheet vibrating sander using a special scouring pad.
You have me curious about that- are we talking about something like the 3M pads? Buddy of mine uses that stuff on a 10,000 RPM grinder and one of those neat little 1" belt pneumatic sanders for prettying up stainless welds. Works slick.
I’ll bet such a setup on a half-sheet sander would be the cookies for all kinds of jobs…
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Our Sander has 1 angle grinder (11,000 rpm) to knock down hardware, 1 variable sander (6,000 rpm), 2 variable sander/polishers (2300 rpm) and a half-sheet shaker all on the table. The cord management is pretty impressive.
As I said before discs are super important.
Yeah, I can just imagine. How you keep from reinventing macrame with all those cords- that would be pretty tricky.
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Trouble is,
starting out sanding with the aggressive disc sander is like learning to drive in a forumula race car. Some s!*t is gonna get wrecked. This was especially true for those of us who sanded in the “pre-variable speed” days (more like variable finger). I see it as quite possible to learn accuracy and precision with a variable disc sander; just keep it on low. To produce perfectly level work will require high speeds, upwards of 5,000 rpm however…
I’ve said it before- sanders are the Rodney Dangerfields of the business. They don’t get no respect. But a good one can make a board beautiful, a bad one can ruin it in a heartbeat.
I mean, you’re talking about a tool designed originally for grinding welds on steel plate. It’s a heavy mutha. And even with soft backing pads and finer paper, you can eat through a lamination with just a moment’s inattention.
Back in the day, blipping the trigger to keep the revs low, while keeping your disc surface tangent to the curve of the surface you’re sanding, with a tool that weighs ten pounds and up, and doing it all day? Ohhh yeah, that was OODLES of fun. I had even more fun, 'cos I was doing boat hulls, vertical surfaces or upside down. 'Course, The Old Man had his eye on me, and anytime the sound was wrong , not the steady sound of doing the surface but that wee ‘nnch’ sound it made when I caught an edge - I caught hell.
For someone starting out with a real full-on disc sander, I strongly advise lots of practice. On pieces of scrap softwood to start with, to get the feel of it, then graduate to plywood. Work on sanding away one layer, one ply of it, down to the glue and no more, smoothly without gouges or crescent-moon bites here and there, and when you can do that you have it.
As kokua says, when you can master a tool like that, make it do fine work beyond what the maker’s envisioned when they designed the thing - that’s a pretty good feeling.
doc…