Versatility of a Surface Sander

Its gotten to where I don't think I could live without having a surface sander in my shop. So what I want to do today is talk about all sorts of different things to display the versatility that these machines could bring to your shop. So starting off, let's look at sending a face frame through the sander. Now, a couple of things going on here, no matter how carefully you put a face frame together, quite commonly, you end up with the rails and styles not quite lined up with each other. You've got to flatten and those out, especially on the backside, before you marry this up to a cabinet carcass or you're going to have a lousy glue joint between the back of the frame and the front of the case. Now here on a surface sander, a couple of things going on. You might notice that the face frame is bigger than the sander is wide. It's one of the things these are great at. With that cantilevered head, we can run stuff that's effectively twice as wide as the size of the sander head itself. One of the things we need to do is take this out of parallel. So in its normal position, the head and the platen are perfectly parallel to each other. What I'm going to do is, using this lever, change that position by just a few thousandths. Now it's a little bit more open out here than it is over here, and that helps prevent a sanding line that might otherwise be created by the edge of the head. Now let's look at the setup and how you're going to get going on the sander. What we want to do is get this positioned where the part that you're going to sand and this fine abrasive, this is 150 in here right now, is under the head. And when I turn that by hand, it comes down to where it just starts kissing the material. So we want to make sure we don't try to take too much off in one pass. And we are good to go. On the switch side here, we've got two things going on. One paddle switch that'll control the head itself. This switch controls the conveyor. That's this abrasive looking stuff here, that's going to push our material under the sanding head, keep everything moving forward. Now that might take just one more pass on the front side, a few passes on the backside, it's going to be dead flat. The operation does introduce cross Grange scratches here on the rail. What I found is that just a little bit of sanding, after the surface sander, using a random orbit handheld sander, I can take those scratches right out of there and this is ready to go on the cabinet. So the surface sander, one job it does, great way to do work on face frames. Now let me add something here. Before the face frame gets put together, I send the pieces through on edge, in order to make sure these interior edges especially are nice and clean, and I don't have to go back and work on them later with a handheld sander. So that's a great pre-assembly trick for your face frames. Now, what you can see there is that I could sand something bigger than the sanding head. So imagine you're working with a big panel, like this big thing. Imagine the planer it would take to send this through a planer. It'd be huge. It'd be like an aircraft carrier. With the surface sander, same configuration, a little bit open on this end using that lever that helps me do that. I can sand this nice and flat. So we're talking, cutting boards, all sorts of different objects that we glue up like this, making big panels. So that's another great application, to these Sanders, and I've still got some more to show you. So let's keep going on the versatility of a surface sander. Now let's talk thin and short. And I don't mean me cause I don't think I'm either. What I mean is material like this. If you need to make veneer, I've already resigned this piece. Now I've got bandsaw marks on this face. We want to get those bands on marks off. The other thing that we can do with a sander that you can't do with a planer is send pieces through that are really, really, really short. So let's have a look at how these babies feed, and again back to the versatility that these machines can bring to your shop. Well, this is pretty cool. Look at how skinny we've gotten that chunk of walnut. And that really, really short piece that I was sending through down to that same skinniness. Now, one of the things that's kind of neat is there are digital readouts that are available. So this tells us in thousands of an inch, exactly how thick or how thin our material is. Now with that coupled with the benefit of the height adjustment mechanisms getting better and better, tighter and tighter with no backlash at all. And these mechanisms, once we dial this in, you can set it and forget it. And you know that the machine thickness is right where you want it to be. The other thing you might be asking about in your head is, what if I overfeed the material? What if I try to take too much off? Well, we've got a benefit here as well. On this conveyor, it can automatically detect if you overload the head. If you do that, it's going to automatically slow down the rate at which the material is being fed, so it eliminates that overload. So even I can't mess up feeding my material through the machine. Good overview then of making veneer skinny pieces and working with short pieces. More stuff I want to show you though about the versatility of these machines How's that for a great little trick you can do on a surface sander. Think of it. You assemble a drawer. You assemble a jewelry box. After assembly you can send it through to make sure the top corners and the bottom corners are all perfectly flush. Really adds a nice touch to the work that you're doing in your shop. Now, outside of what I've shown you already, let's broaden the envelope just a little bit. If you're a scroller, what you can do is fasten the pattern to your work. Using spray adhesive. Once the scroll saw work is done, send that through the sand or use the abrasive to take off the paper and the adhesive. Go to a finer abrasive until this is sanded out nice and smooth, just the way you want it. How about end grain work, like an ingrained cutting board. No way this can go through a planer because it is after all end grain up, but we've got some unevenness here. We've got glue residue to take off. Surface sander is a great way to handle that. If you're a Turner, not Ted Turner, but a lathe Turner, it's not impossible that you make glue-ups like this, and then you stack them in kind of a brick pattern in order to make up a bowl blank. Same deal on the end grain. You can send that through, clean it up to get it nice and flat. Both faces parallel, so that when you glue them up in a stack, everything's going to come out just great. If you're a luthier, we can send those parts through as well. Guitar backs, guitar soundboards. Great way to get them nice and thin, like you saw with that veneer. Nice and flat. So lots and lots of things you can do with a surface sander in your shop. And I think if you're anything like me, once you get used to having one you're going to wonder how you ever lived without it.