Belt Sander Tips

I know that a lot of word workers have belt sanders in their shop and they don't use them because they're afraid of them. I want to help you tame your belt sander and make sure that you're using it every place you can. Just a couple of things to master on this, and I'm gonna help you get really good at using this machine. First off, if you're still belt sander shopping, let me give you a couple of things to look for. One, bigger is better. This particular sander is a four by 24. That means the belts are four inches wide, 24 inches long. That big four inch platen gives me a lot of work surface down on my material. It helps keep the sander flat so it's less likely to rock than a narrower sander would be, makes it very, very easy to hold the sander flat. The other thing I like a lot is variable speed. On this machine, speed is controlled by this dial right here. I can fine tune my speed of the machine. What I want to do often is slow it way down. Running the machine at a lower speed means it's gonna take off material less quickly, not gonna be as aggressive, so less chance I'm gonna dig in. Now, look at what I want to do here. This is a cabinet that I've been working on. I've got a face frame attached to a plywood carcass. The veneer on the top here is only about a 24th of an inch thick. I want you to get so good at using a belt sander that liked me, you're even willing to sand this 24th of an inch thick veneer with a belt sander. Little bit of practice, you can do it. The variable speed helps out a bunch 'cause I can slow down the stock removal. The other thing is, put a fine belt on here when you're first getting the hang of the machine. I've got 120 grit belt. If I use a coarser belt, of course, it's gonna take wood off faster. That kind of amplifies any mistake I make because it's taken wood off that much more quickly. So a fine belt is gonna help you be a little bit more conservative with the machine. The other thing I want is good dust collection. I can take off possibly lots and lots and lots of material. All that dust is gonna get airborne if I don't have good dust collection. In this case, I've actually got the machine connected to a vacuum with a tool actuate, an outlet on it. So the belt sander itself is plugged into an outlet on the vacuum. When I turn the belt sander on the vacuum comes on. When I turn the belt sander off, it shuts off. Does a great job of grabbing the dust right here at the scene of the accident, right here where all that dust is being caused. So we're gonna do a good job with dust collection. Now with my work itself, pay attention to how you set up your project. Instead of having this on a work bench that could put it way up here and get my arms in an awkward position, I've got this on a shop stool. So the work is nice and low, that lets me keep my body, my shoulders, right over the work. So that it's very easy to, again, keep that sander nice and flat. So, having this down on that lower stool makes that part of it easier. Now, mechanically, when you get started with the machine, what I'd like you to do is have the platen about half off the end of the material here. So I don't want to start too far away. I don't want to start too far in. About half the platen is cantilevered off the end of the project. I'm gonna lift the sander, turn it on. And then kind of like landing a plane. I'm gonna ease this down into my work and make a stroke this way, stroke back, working the whole length of this project. When I'm done, like taking off with a plane, I'm gonna ease this off the end of the project. Now I'd like to make sure that I can watch what's happening here. In other words, how much wood am I taking off? I'm gonna do that by marking the surface with a pencil line. Now, what I can do is monitor that line as I make passes with the sander to make sure I'm taking an equal amount of pencil line off the whole surface which means I'm taking an equal amount of wood off the whole surface. When you make your passes, we want to run in the same direction as the grain. I'm gonna do a pass the width of the sander down this way, move over a little bit, come back up, move over a little bit, come back up. My goal is that each pass overlaps the previous pass by about half the width of the platen. So a little bit of practice plus watching your pencil lines, you'll get the hang of it. The last thing is, make sure that this stuff isn't getting in your way. It's not a bad idea to kind of sling the cord up over your shoulder. Maybe even the vacuum hose as well. That way you know that your sander isn't gonna accidentally run over them as you're making your passes back and forth. So now we're ready for a nice gentle landing. See what we can do with a sanding passer. Now those pencil lines really paid off 'cause what was happening is that the face frame is solid wood. It's a little bit harder than the veneer I'm working on over here. Plus it was standing up above the veneer. So as I had my pencil line being worn off, taken off by the sander, because this material was a little bit harder, it was sanding a little bit slower. So I had to come back and do additional passes there in order to get that strip caught up with this one. So the pencil line was very, very, very, very beneficial. If I didn't have it, and I was working on getting this down, I might've taken too much off of this side, suddenly have sanded through the veneer and then this project is no good at all 'cause you've got a sand through. So with those tips, I think that's gonna make it a lot easier with practice, for you to get the hang of using the belt sander. Once it becomes your friend, you're gonna use it all the time. Very, very good tool to use in the shop. Now, one of the things that's gonna happen is that as you run the belt sander and you use it, you're gonna get sawdust in the belt. And in fact, with some of our sanding here, because I was taking glue residue off, I probably have a mix in here of glue and sawdust. With heat, the glue gets warm. It melts, the sawdust will really, really stick to it. So we don't want that to happen. We want to keep this abrasive nice and clean, make sure that we get a lot of life out of it. That's where abrasive cleaning sticks like this come into play. This is actually made out of crepe. And what I want to do is frequently run my sanding belt against an abrasive cleaning stick to get all of this stuff out of it. Using it like this is kind of tough because I've got the sander in one hand, this and the other hand, how am I gonna manage that? What I've done is taken an abrasive cleaning stick and epoxied it down to a board. Then I can clamp the board to a table. So now with just a kiss or two on top of that stick, I can very, very easily clean the belt. So that simple, that belt is like new again. The abrasive cleaning sticks are way less expensive than the sanding belts are. There's no such thing as using these too much. So frequent use of that cleaning stick is gonna keep your sander and your sander belt working well on the surface here. Little bit of practice, you'll be a belt sander master.