RE: Tools>Sanders

[coogzilla]

See what ya got. A show and tell.
I have been known to staple sandpaper to a 2X with a staple gun
and think that was a good setup. Naw. Coogs

 

[jimsong]

I'm sure I wasn't the first, But I did come up with the idea independently-I needed to carve a perfetly straight, tapered, convex, chunk of birds eye maple, for the finger board of a upright tub bass.
I tapered it on the tablesaw, knocked off the excess wood on the front corners with a power plane, then I cut a 80 grit and a 120 grit 21 inch sanding belt, and using spray adhesive, glued them to a 3X3X3/8 aluminum angle "iron"
I then scribed the upper and lower arcs on the ends of the blank, and scribbled all over the face to be carved with a carpenter's pencil.
I clampd the angle "iron to a bench, and just scrubbed the blank back and forth on the sand paper, scribbling on the high spots now and then, until I had a finger board. And it looked great!
I don't know if it's accurate or not, because I've not finished the bass yet.I was 75% done with the project, when I moved to Texas, and I am not even sure where all the parts are at this very moment.
But the sanding apparatus performed superbly!

 

[jimsong]

On a separate, and barely related subject- My Dad liked working in wood. He just wasn't very good at it. He most assuredly NOT a tool man. "A shovel is a shovel, A hammer is a hammer! Do you need a different fork for pork and beef?"
In the last few years of his life, he took refinishing antiques as a hobby. His widow got most of his projects, but I did get the chest-of-drawers, that was mine, the 17 years I lived with him,and my little brother used it after I left home.
After using it for my sons, then the divorce, then it was in storage for many years, I decided to refinish it.
Using a chemical stripper, I took off the thick layers of paint, seeing the wood brought tears to my eyes.
He would NOT buy a sander! "All a sander does is sand, what difference does it make how it sands!" The only sander he ever used, was a cheap rubber disk, chucked in a quarter inch drill.
The chest was covered with the swirls of a sander meant for the crudest of work, and he used it as a finish sander.
That piss-poor refinishing job brought up a zillion memories.

 

[Kayak Jack]

Wood lives; so do Dads. Both are valuable and respectable in their own, inimitable ways. You have precious memories there to show your Sons, and let them ponder a bit.

 

[jdupre']

Jimsong, something I read many years ago stuck with me. You should always leave some "mark of the maker" on a handmade item. It makes people appreciate that the item was made by a real person and not by a machine that cranked out perfect clones. Your dad's "marks" are probably more precious to you than any perfect finish could have been.

Joey