George Vondriska

Why You Need a Surface Sander

George Vondriska
Duration:   10  mins

Description

George Vondriska demonstrates the benefits of using a surface sander for your woodworking projects. A WoodWorkers Guild of America (WWGOA) original video.

Surface sander provided by EZ Sander. For more information, visit ezsanders.com.

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One Response to “Why You Need a Surface Sander”

  1. mikek

    George, my pet peeve with such sanders even the drum versions are the belts clogging up quickly and rendering them useless, any tips?

I've been asked pretty often about the difference between surface sanders and planers and what's the benefit of having a surface sander like this one in your shop? So that's what I wanna talk to you about today. I wanna give you some education about how you can benefit from a surface sander like this one. And there are a handful of things going on, especially as we contrast them against planers. One thing, look at the capacity we have on this machine.

It's 37 inches wide, so hard, if not darn impossible, to get a planer that's gonna work on a surface that big. Plus, the ability to do end grain on wood, man-made materials, send big face frames through there and flatten them. There's all sorts of stuff we can do with a surface sander that you just plain can't do with a planer. So let's look more in depth at this machine and what kind of benefits a machine like this can add to your woodworking shop. If I open up the cabinet here, you're gonna get a good understanding of just how these machines work.

Here's the deal. This is a wide belt surface sander, so what that means is that there's a belt all the way across the 37 inch width of the machine, wraps around the drum, down to the bottom, back up to the top, real similar to the way a portable belt sander works. If I take the tension off of it, that would allow me to change the belt, so that's as simple as sliding this one off, slide the new one on. We can go as coarse as a 36 grit, which looks a lot like an asphalt road, that's gonna take a lot of material off really quickly, all the way up to 220 grit, which is gonna let you do a lot of your finished sanding on here. One of the things I really like about a surface sander is that I can send all my project parts through with that fine grit, get that sanding done, before I even assemble it, so it really saves me a lot of time with a random orbit sander on the finished piece.

Plus, when dust collection is good like it is here, I'm keeping all that airborne dust out of my shop. Now the other thing that's important here is that like a portable belt sander, down here at the bottom, there's a platen. Again, if we draw the analogy to a handheld belt sander, this is pretty similar. The belt comes across this platen and makes contact across that whole surface, that whole big flat surface. That's where we're gonna get a real fine finish on our material.

In the case of using the more aggressive grits, like that 36 grit I was talking about, the platen comes out all together. So this is for your finer sanding. So let's get that slid back in, tension back on the belt, and now we can have a look at just what kind of work we can do on this, and again, have a look at advantages of surface sanders over planers. Before we have a look at running material through the machine, let's have a closer look at exactly what surface sanders can do for you in your shop. And I'm gonna start out with something, all woodworkers are up against this, the time comes when you have to glue boards together to make a bigger panel and you end up with something that looks like this.

We've got boards whose faces aren't quite even. There's glue squak on here. We wanna get this cleaned up before we use it in a project, make sure everything is nice and flat, and, of course, you don't want that glue on there. This board is ready to go into the sander right now, something that I wouldn't be willing to do on a planer, because it's pretty easy for this hard glue to chip the knife on a planer. But if we start with a good aggressive paper on the sander, it's gonna clean up the glue, it's gonna level the boards very quickly.

We can step up through the grits and get this to a point where it's nice and smooth and ready to be used in a project. Now, other stuff that we can do here that you either can't do or be hard to do on a planer, how about something like this? Face frame. Couldn't even consider this on a planer because we have cross grain here. But this is a great application for a sander.

I can put the whole face frame together and after it's assembled, I can run it through the sander. It's gonna do a couple of things. It's gonna make sure that on the backside, which marries up against the front of your cabinet, it's dead flat, so when you clamp that and glue it it closes up and it becomes virtually seamless. On the front side, you make sure all your rails and styles are nice and flush. I can assemble a huge face frame that I need for something like a kitchen cabinet, send that whole face frame through and get it cleaned up and flattened like I talked about with this one.

Here is an end grain cutting board I'm working on. Now you know as a woodworker you cannot plane end grain, so sanding is the only way to take care of something like this. And again, with a surface sander, we can start with an aggressive paper, get the glue off of here, get that end grain tear out cleaned up, have this end grain cutting board nice and flat and looking great in no time. This is a piece of man-made material. This is a solid surface countertop.

Man-made products, like acrylic, solid surface countertop, plexiglass, particle board, MDF, can't be planed, but if I need to work on the thickness of them or if I wanna polish them up, I can send them through a sander like I've got here. Now, the door's in the same category as the face frame, but I got another benefit out of this one. I can send this through the sander. It's gonna hit all my components here, get them all in plane across the face, get them all in plane across the back. Again, taking advantage of the width of the machine, I can send a good size door through there.

When they come out, everything is gonna be level. Little bit of work with a finished sander is gonna take the cross grain scratches out of the rails. It's gonna look great and be nice and flat on the front of your cabinet. Now, something like this, you send this through a planer and what you maybe have is a beautiful looking piece of wood that turns into a beautiful looking piece of firewood because a lot of times on a planer as the knives come through a beautiful curly maple like this, they lift the grain and they tear it, and you end up with chips in the material and you've ruined the piece. Surface sanders, because they're doing this through an abrasive and not through a cutting action, it's gonna leave a really nice looking surface behind with no chips in it at all.

So highly figured materials like this are another great candidate for cleaning up with a sander instead of with a planer. Maybe one of the most amazing things of all is that something like this. Now, this is a veneered MDF core product. And as thin as that veneer is, I can send this through the sander, get that veneer nicely polished, and it's gonna come out with no sand through it all, so it's a great way to clean this up without worrying about spending too much time in one spot with something like a random orbit sander. Again, we're in a category of work that there's just no way you could do with a planer.

So lots of benefits to a surface sander. Now, let's have a look at running some product through this thing and just what a great job it does. Let's use this figured maple as an example and have a look at just how the sander really works. Now, some other stuff going on here. There's a conveyor here, that's this gray part, so when I turn this on, the conveyor is gonna start to move in this direction.

When I set my material on top of it, that's what's gonna feed it through. There's a speed control on the conveyor so I can slow it down or speed it up, and that's gonna be affected by how fine and abrasive we're running and how fine a surface finish we're trying to get on our material. Over here on this side of the machine, there's a hand wheel, so when I turn that hand wheel, I can raise or lower this and that's what it's gonna control having this at the right thickness to get our stock to go through. Off here on this side, there's a digital readout. So about the easiest way to do this is I can use a caliper and test the thickness of my material.

Then I can come over here and set this accordingly. So I'm gonna give this a turn. Now we're ready to turn this on and feed the stock through and see how nicely it comes out the other side. With a single pass, that pencil line that was on there is gone, and hopefully you can already see we're starting to get a pretty good polish on this thing. So great example of how the wide belt sander works and what it does for you, what kind of benefit it brings.

So I'm gonna run some more material, some of that other stock that we looked at earlier, so you can have a look at just what kind of positive effect a surface sander can have in your woodworking shop. Well, you saw that curly maple go through and what a great job it did at bringing out the polish in that wood, and that grain is really gonna pop under finish. I also ran these other pieces and we have a great opportunity here to see a before and after and the benefit of that wide belt sander. So this is that end grain cutting board and what a nice job it did getting it from looking like this, pretty icky, to like this where that is this close to being ready for a nice mineral oil finish. Same thing on this edge to edge glue up.

Here's that side that still needs some work 'cause it's got glue, it's uneven, but on this side, a beautiful face that's ready to be incorporated into your project. One of the most incredible things, this piece of veneered MDF right here. This face went through there, not a sand through on it, so very, very nice benefit of that surface sander. Now, another thing that I wanna talk about is surface sander like this in your shop, you can also run drawer boxes or jewelry boxes, any kind of box configuration like this, we can send that through. It's gonna even up the top of that, leave you with a nicely sanded surface.

Think too about bookmatch materials, anything like that, thin veneers that you can send through to make your own veneers. So hopefully in this video clip it helped you with your buying decision to see just how beneficial surface sanders like this can be in your own woodworking shop.

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