Mop (flop?) sanding

[Jay Pique]

Ok, here's the deal. I've got about 1000 little cleats for a wine cellar that need sanding. They're 3/4" square by 12.5" long with a small bevel at one of the ends - I just lopped one of the corners off. The two adjacent long edges that die into the bevel have been rounded over with a 16th" radius bit. What I need to do now is figure out how to round over the sharp edges where I've cut the bevel. I'm not looking for perfection since these are just cleats, and barely seen. But I do want them broken a bit, and I'd like not to have to do it by hand. I'd prefer to shove it into a spinning abrasive flap or flop or mop sander for a second or so and be done with it. Has anyone done this? I'm looking for suggestions as to which particular mop head to buy.

Thanks.

Oh yeah - the wood is redwood, reclaimed from wine vats. It's very soft, but very, very nice. The entire shop smells like red wine too.

JP

[SonomaProducts.com]

Mop sander wouldn't maybe be the best for this. They are better at getting into linear grooves of molding. What you really want is a pneumatic (sp?) sander. Think of a go-cart wheel rim with just an inner tube mounted (no tire) and then a sanding belt over that. mounted on a motor and spinning. You adjust the air pressure to get variable amounts of radius.

You can maybe fake this by inverting a palm or half sheet vibrating sander and mount the sandpaper with some foam rubber or other squish material beneath it. Clamp it to a table, sanding side up and you are off to the races.

[LEGEND65]

I've tried bench mounting a 1/4 sheet sander and a big NO on that plan. I replaced the bolts that were holding the two halves of it together with threaded rod and sandwiched it between two pieces of ply which were pocket screwed down to a mounting board. The sander really doesn't like it. The bench it gets clamped to really doesn't like it. Everything that *was* on said bench that is now on the floor really doesn't like it. It sort of works, but it wants to vibrate the stock all over the place and you'll be changing the paper every 5 minutes.

A flap sander is pretty much designed to do that, isn't it? It seems like the Sand-O-Flex is about the only option, other than the Grizzly standalone machine if you want to go all out.

-Kevin

[Andy Dingley]

How about a bench-mounted disk sander? Not to hard to make your own either (commercial layshaft, turned plywood disk, recycled motor)

[LEGEND65]

I know that Jay has an edge sander, because when I was looking for advice on getting one he helped me out, and I know it'd be easy enough to do it with that, and he probably has a disc sander if he has an edge sander. But since he's got 1000 of the suckers to do he's looking for a way to do it without having to pivot them against the belt/disc. I would think with the grizzly flap sander you could set it up on the bench with some thing to raise up a table under the flap sander part and just shove a few of them in there at a time. I can't see why it wouldn't work, but I can't say it definitely would either.

-Kevin

[Nova]

Either of these should work:

?page=5320&filter=round%20edge

[-MIKE-]

Dude's going the wrong way, against the grain, in this photo, isn't he?

[Jay Pique]

They're done. Well....half of them are done. I used a Sand-o-flex disc thingy on the drill press, and it worked "ok". It wasn't the edges that I wanted to round over - they had already been done with a palm router before I cut them to length. What I need to hit were the sharp edges at the end where it was cut and beveled. I could have hit the side edges on with the 16th inch radius bit again, but that would have meant handling them all again, and it's a pretty small area and maybe not worth the effort. And that still wouldn't have eased the two 45 degree edges on the bevel. The Sand-o-flex head let me just stick the end in and roll it around a little to hit all the edges. Once I get into a rhythm I was able to get the edges consistent with each other, but not exactly how I'd like them.

I was thinking by the end of it that if I factored in the time spent rounding over the initial lengths and doing the mop sanding, I might could do them all "by hand" just as quick. What I was thinking was I could set up a very narrow vacuum clamp foot toggle. I put one on the clamp, toggle it on with my foot, and take a quick couple passes over the whole length and width of the cleat with a sanding sponge, sort of rounding over the bevel at the end of my stroke.

But who knows. At the end of the day, once they get installed and filled with wine, you barely see any of them anyways!

JP

[Jay Pique]

Oh yeah - he's on his way to a nice big tearout! Nice catch.

JP

[Gerald Ross]

Maybe it's a Dudette.

[-MIKE-]

She needs to shave her knuckles, then. :-)