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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