Stain Preparation: What Grit to Sand Furniture On a quiet Saturday morning, you clear the dining table and pull the tarp tight. The surface is a patchwork of rings, scratches, and a few mystery stains from a previous life—nothing that an …
Sanding Sponge vs Paper on Curves: Pro Results If you’ve ever stood in your garage at 9 p.m., holding a cup of coffee with one hand and a carved table leg with the other, you know the moment: the curve looks great until you touch it with …
Wrap Sandpaper on a Sanding Block the Right Way I still remember the first shelf I built for our entryway—a simple maple plank resting on two brackets, meant to hold keys and a couple of planters. The board came out of the planer with faint …
How to Avoid Rounding Edges with Detail Sander Sheets A crisp edge is honesty you can feel. You run a fingertip along the rail of a cabinet door or the rim of a keepsake box and know immediately whether the prep was careful or hurried. The …
Paint Stripping vs Sanding: When Chemicals Win You can hear a project before you see it: the whine of an orbital sander, the hiss of a dust extractor, the rasp of grit carving tracks in an old finish. The other soundtrack is a quiet shop, …
Abrasive Testing: Compare Scratch Depth at Equal Grits It starts the same way in every shop: coffee cooling on the bench, clamp marks still fresh on yesterday’s glue-up, and a stack of sandpaper cut into tidy quarters. You grab two …
Open Coat Sandpaper, Paper Weight, and Flexibility Saturday morning, mug of coffee steaming on the bench. The shop is still cool, and the only sound is your block plane sliding across a maple board. You’re smoothing a reclaimed slab into a …
Resin polishing: Pads and compounds for plastics On a quiet Saturday, I watched a friend slowly lower a buffing pad onto the cloudy edge of his epoxy river table. The coffee mugs had left fine scuffs; sunlight turned them into halos. He’d …
Flush Slurry with Wet Dry Sandpaper for Clean Cuts The first time I noticed loading, I was hunched over a maple cutting board in a chilly garage, chasing a glass-smooth finish that never seemed to arrive. The sandpaper was supposed to be …
Cork vs Rubber Sanding Block: Even Pressure, Better Finish You feel it before you see it: the drag of abrasive across primer, the subtle chatter in your wrist, the way dust plumes differently at the edge than it does in the center. The …