How to make a chopping board with the leftover woods of your workshop

Sanding is an important step for your wood project. Sanding is one of the steps in the finishing process to remove any unwanted marks or scratches on the wood. This step is supposed to make your woods smooth so it is nice to look at without any annoying stain or other marks. To finish this step we need best Orbital Sander of sanders

Usually, after you use planer to cut your woods into your desired thickness, they tend to leave marks so that’s why you need to do wood sanding. Tool that you need to do sanding is sandpaper. There are lots of sandpaper types they are called the sandpaper’s grits. There are two kinds of setting of those grits that are quite familiar:

• 80, 120, and 220 grits.
• 100, 150, and 220 grits.

The higher it is, the grit will be finer. Always start with the coarse grit because it shaves any imperfectness on the wood’s surface if you start with fine grit it would be very hard to remove those imperfectness. Some types of woods might need super fine grits to achieve really smooth surface.

While the machine that you could choose is either your hand or electric sanders. There is actually two ways to do it, either literally using your hands or use a block. So it named block sanding but your hand is the motor of it. Each of them of course will have their own advantages and disadvantages that would make you think which one should I do. Here I am going to give a little explanation about each aspect.

Speed

Those electric sanders have motor built in and use electricity so of course it will have more power than when you sanding using your hands. It will take less of your energy if you are using electric sanders. Those motor will make sanding faster, it becomes so handy if you deal with a lot of big woods and rough woods. If you usually just use small woods for small projects at home, then sanding with your hands is not really a problem. Those professional of course need the electric sanders because they have to work fast so it could raise their productivity.

Dangerousness

Honestly, both of them are dangerous. Using electric sanders, you probably have a chance to get an injury if you put your hand on the pads while it is moving. While using your hands, if you do it for quite a long time of course your hands would feel numb and you might have chance that your skin is the one that got shave off with the sandpapers but this method will produce less amount of dust. Everything is possible, make sure to cover yourself.

Time

Using the electric sanders of course would save a lot of time and less effort and less of your energy. Yes, if you do sanding with your hand it might take ages if you are working on big projects.

Difficulties

I might say that using the electric sanders is much easier than if you use your hands because you just need to move it around and it would do their job. Just don’t give it pressure because it will kick you back. While if you are using your hands, you have to non-stop rubbing the sandpapers to the woods which is harder and tiring.

Effectiveness

Those that using electric sanders is less time consuming because it has the motor that moves it around while you have to non-stop rubbing the woods if you use your hands. So the electric sander is more effective in terms of time.

While in terms of effort, yet again because the electric sanders have a tool built in to move it around of course you could use less effort rather than those effort you have to spend on rubbing the woods until your desired smoothness. So, the electric sander is more effective in this term.

But, on the other hand, in terms of the ability to reach those corner and small spaces, sanding with your hand is the winner. When you use your hands, it would give your more flexibility to reach those small corners because you could just fold the sandpaper or using a putty knife to help you reach that. While the electric sanders are big and stiff, only some of it that designed to reach small corner but even those are not gonna fully reach all of the isolated corner.

Result

If you do great on both methods, the result would be pretty nice. You just have to learn how to operate the tools you have.

Price

If you are going to use a lot of this machine, then invest in one of those electric sanders would be a great idea. But if you are not going to use the machine often, then hand sanding might do the job too.