Calm radio9/11/2023 ![]() I was pleasantly surprised by the technological advances now standardly available in inexpensive sanders. It’s been several decades since I bought a wood sander, but I recently needed a new one for a large finishing job. You could put this kit together yourself with p500, p800, p3000 grit pads and a foam compounding pad with some 3m rubbing compound but the kit is very convenient and should last a long time as long as you use water with the sanding pads. The compass lens was crystal clear! I’ve since been polishing anything plastic that I have that’s been scratched. The other day I discovered that the compass for my sailboat was scuffed pretty badly, and I tried using the polishing kit to buff it out (after testing on some safety glasses first). My headlights looked new and were way more effective after the treatment. Basically, you use the progressively finer grit sanding surfaces to smooth the plastic and grind away the scratches and finally polish using the 3M rubbing compound. I originally bought the 3M Headlight Polishing Kit in order to remove the haze on my truck’s plastic headlights, but I have since found that it has a plethora of uses. If you want to do more delicate work, you need to get higher mesh belts from a specialty store like Rio Grande, Klingspor, or maybe Grainger or McMaster-Carr. Also, the belts and spindles it comes with are extremely aggressive and are meant for hogging away wood. Two things to know: I find I often have to adjust the belt tension to prevent the belt from rising or falling, but this is easy to do on account of a large, well-placed knob. And a vacuum port is molded into the back of the unit for clean up. It has an incredibly well made tilt table, with fence, that folds down onto a molded storage bay which holds all the accessories it comes with. It’s designed to sit on a bench top, but they also molded slots into the bottom so that it rests stably on a sawhorse. It’s also very quick to swap out the belt and use it as an oscillating spindle sander, meaning you can handle both flat and curved sanding. ![]() I routinely sand to the center of a 1/64 slot on an Incra ruler. The metal platen provides plenty of support for serious, precision sanding. I use mine almost daily to fabricate parts in wood, metal, and plastic. The belt rotates like a standard sander, but also simultaneously and automatically oscillates up and down 60 times per minute, giving you better space coverage and a wider stroke (about 1 in.) this is especially helpful with larger pieces, because you don’t need to reposition or flip the piece to sand the whole thing. The word that best describes the Ridgid oscillating belt sander is “workhorse.” It is one of those rare tools which ends up at the heart of your workshop - fast, precise, durable. I could not have done it without these pads. I used these for jobs that no sandpaper can handle, like polishing a concrete bowl to expose underlying glass aggregate. In use, the matrix slowly wears away exposing fresh diamond grit. The Velcro is also color-coded in case the numerals wear off, which hasn’t happened to mine yet. The back of each pad is covered with “loop” Velcro and marked with silver numbers indicating the pad’s grit size. The disc is attached to an electric grinder with an included rubber pad holder covered with black “hook” Velcro on one side and a 5/8- 11 threaded brass insert. The elastomer has industrial diamond grit embedded inside. This “softness” allows it to contour itself to curved surfaces. The business side of each 4”-diameter pad consists of a polymer honeycomb that looks sort of like the bottom of a sneaker. This is sandpaper for stone, ceramic, glass and concrete. Sign up here to get Tools for Possibilities a week early in your inbox. The tools might be outdated or obsolete, but the possibilities they inspire are new. Once a week we’ll send out a page from Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities.
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