Using an Orbital Sander

Video Transcript

Hi, my name is Kevin and on behalf of Expert Village I'm going to talk to you about using a random orbital sander on plywood. In your typical plywood situation you've got a thin sheet of veneer over may layers of solid wood that are crossed oriented so typically your veneer is probably about a thirty second of an inch thick. And on this what's really important to remember is you don't want to use a belt sander which moves monetarily fast you can use a random orbital sander which is much more gentle. Plywood generally comes out of the factory belt sanded to about 120 I believe is the grit they use so you can generally start with about 100-120 or even higher and since it's been sanded what your really wanting to do is just clean up any marks that have been made by machines in the shop or in the warehouse when it was there. And so you?re really just cleaning it up really quickly, you know it's not going to take a lot of sanding. It also helps flush up veneer and solid edge nosing which we have here to create a real even surface. And any little fuzzies that have come off the table saw or anything like that. It cleans those up really, really quickly and so when you use a random orbital on here, you want to keep it moving always. You never want to stand still at one point. You want to be moving at a speed that I will show you when we're actually sanding. But you always want to keep moving, you never want to stay in one area because these machines will sand through this veneer very quickly if you don't keep them moving. It's important to remember that with the random orbital you are able to just hold the work piece down with one hand and operate the machine on the other. That's an option you don't have with the much more powerful machine like the belt sander. So in this instance it is ok not to fasten the work piece unless it's a lot smaller then this then you do want to secure it. But on a big piece like this, hand pressure will be fine for a random orbital sander but as you can see we've got this surface smoothed out here. And what a random orbital sander will tell you is it's going to let you see if there's any dings or dents in the wood that you?re going to need to repair before you put a finish on it. So the random orbital is just getting you ready to be hand sanding and it's going to reveal any mistakes that might have not been obvious earlier with oxidation on the wood. Making it a little darker and harder to see but we've gotten rid of all of the little fuzzies on the edge, we've flushed up the solid nosing to the edge here and we've got this ready to be hand sanded and then to take a finish from there.

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