Which Electric Sander to Use?

It's really Important that you pick the right sander for the job when you're ready to start working on your woodworking projects. So let me talk you through an array here and help you dial in on what's going to work best for you. Starting with the good old belt sander which unfortunately belt sanders get a really bad name because people don't know how to use them. But what they're great at is flattening large surfaces, taking a lot of material off quickly. The bad news is, they take a lot of material off quickly. So it's really all about keeping the sander nice and flat on your work surface. It's great when they have variable speed so you can slow the speed down, that provides more control so that you're less likely to gouge your project. As we talk about finishing and how it relates to these machines, don't sweat this one too much, because again what we're really about here is taking a lot of material off quickly. You cannot go from a belt sander to finish, need a bunch of intermediary steps. One of those steps could be, sander like this. These travel by a lot of different names. Sanders like this have been around for a really really long time. People call them orbital sanders, finishing sanders, in this particular case, a quarter sheet sander, because it uses a quarter of a conventional sheet of sandpaper. They're also machines like this very similar, half sheet sanders. Of course they're bigger because they use a half a sheet of sandpaper. On this machine when I run it, the pad basically just runs in a small oval pattern. Now there's good news and there's bad news. The good news is because of the small rate at which they remove material, even with a course grit on here, it's pretty hard to mess up your project with one of these. The bad news is, because of the slow rate at which they remove material, it'd take ya really long time to sand an entire project and get it where you want it to be with one of these. So a good question would be, do I even need to own this style of sander? There are occasions where they're very handy. One of the things you can look at is that, it does come to a corner. So if I need to sand to an inside corner of a project, I can get this sander right in there. The other thing I still use them for a lot is anytime where I've got an eased edge and I were to run a sander over that edge, they're very good for that. They provide very good control to allow me to work on those rounded corners. The downside to them is that because of the way they work, that oval pattern that they create is always the same. So if this sits in just one spot if you're holding it in one spot and running it it's going to create scratch marks because there's no overlap of that pattern. That's where these babies come in. This is called a random orbit sander. So we've got a couple of things going here. We've got a disc on there that's gonna spin when I turn it on. So it takes material off quickly like a disc sander would, but it brings to it, the finesse of a finishing sander by keeping that moving in an oval pattern. But that's where the random orbit part comes in. So it's running in a random orbit. What that means is that a particular abrasive particle on there will never go in the same path twice. Because those particles overlap each other, that does a great job of eliminating swirl marks, so you get a higher quality finish. But remember the general recommendation is, even when we're using this sander, you want to finish your project with hand sanding in the direction of the grain to make sure you take off any swirl marks left behind by a random orbit sander. Same thing here as with the belt sander. I've got variable speed on these machines, so I can slow it down, get really, really good control. Really helps me optimize the surface finish and make sure I don't take material off when I don't want to. Last thing we got here is what's called a straight line sander. And oddly enough, like the name implies, the pad on this one only moves in a straight line. The benefit to that is, if I need to work on an edge like this edge I have here, I can run this sander over it because I have a contoured pad it'll conform to that edge. And additionally, my pad will only run in that direction. So the benefit to that is, it helps eliminate swirl marks that I might get because my abrasive is moving parallel to the grain direction. Downside, they're not going to remove material very quickly. So from belt sander, to straight line sander, there are applications for each of these machines in your shop. And the key is to just pick the one that does the best job depending on what part of your project you're involved in at that time.