Sanding Hacks That Will Save You A Lot of Time

If you are a woodworker of any kind, whether you are making cabinets, doors, shelves, instruments, toys, decoy ducks, or anything in between, having the right tools and knowledge in your arsenal is super important.  

One aspect of every woodworking project is sanding. No, nobody wants a project that has rough edges and looks unfinished, which means that you have to sand it down, something that also goes for fine and intricate detail work. The point here is that sanding is actually one of the most difficult and time-consuming aspects of woodworking projects, so saving time is a big deal.  

Something that is very important to note here is that the right type of sander is critical for good quality work. Let’s go over 3 big time sanding hacks that will save you a lot of time, both in the long run and the short run. 

1. Using Some Kind Of Anti Skid Base

One of the biggest hacks we can give you here to help save you a lot of time when sanding your woodworking projects is to make sure your work pieces cannot slip around on the table. Sanding is already hard enough to do accurately as it is, and if your woodworking piece is slipping and sliding around the table, it is just going to make things a heck of a lot harder. You have to constantly adjust the positioning and placement of your projects.  

Having it slide around the surface beneath is also bad because it can cause some major damage, both to the project itself and the table underneath. Therefore, you might want to consider getting yourself an anti–skid base of sorts, like an anti–skid router base.  

It’s pretty much just a textured rubber matt that goes in between the surface and your project, thus stopping it from moving around. This will help save a lot of time because you won’t constantly have to turn your sander off to readjust the workpiece, plus it will help protect your final project from damage caused by movement. 

2. An Easy Flat Surface Sander

Now, while it is true that regular sanders, orbital sanders, and miniature detail sanders to work well for a lot of specific jobs, using machines is not always the best. Machines can move too quickly and remove too much material from your project at once, therefore resulting in a less than stellar final piece.  

Folks, using machines for sanding is not always better. With that being said, you might have seen some people glue sandpaper to a piece of wood, and then use that to do some fine sanding where precision and smoothness is required.  

It’s not always about being the fastest to completion, because with this kind of thing, quality and speed are often not going to happen at the same time. However, using a block of wood with sandpaper glued to it is not exactly ideal all of the time either. Therefore, a good sanding hack for you to keep in mind is to make yourself an easy DIY flat surface sander.  

In other words, this is more or less a small plank of wood or piece of plywood where you have glued a piece of sandpaper too. Now, if you have small workpieces that need sanding, you can take the piece of the flat surface sander, something which helps increase accuracy and can save you time too. 

3. Removing The Sanding Dust

The other sanding hack to save you time that you need to know all about has to do with the wood dust you create when sanding anything and everything. There is a reason why many machines, woodworking machines, come with dust ports and blowers to get rid of the dust. This is because the dust gets in the way. It hinders you from having the level of accuracy that you need, it can actually scrape and scratch your projects, and at the very least, having a bunch of particles in the way makes it really hard to see what you are doing.  

Therefore, to help save you time when sanding, making sure to always remove the dust is important. This is especially important when you move from coarse to finer sanding.  

Simply put, sanding, if you do not remove the dust, is more or less like sanding that very same dust. You just end up pushing dust around while not being able to see what you are doing. Getting some compressed air to regularly blast the dust away is a big-time hack that will help make life a heck of a lot easier no doubt. 

Conclusion 

No, these hacks are nothing too fancy or ground-breaking, but at the end of the day, they will help make your sanding jobs much easier, faster, and more efficient too.  

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