What is an Orbital Sander?

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kevin, and on behalf of Expert Village, I am going to talk to you a little bit about random orbital sanders. A random orbital sander is a really useful machine to use when you're towards the end of your project and you're starting to clean up mill marks from the machines, table saws, routers, and start to help your piece achieve the finished look and get it ready for finish to be put on it. After you've done belt sanding, a little bit more of the rougher sanding, if that's necessary, you're going to want to use this, which is really going to start to smooth things out, in generally higher grids of 100, 120, 150, and so on are which you're going to use on this machine right here. It's for finer sanding in general. You can use it to sort of sculpt and things like that, but generally it's a machine you're going to want to use to clean up. For instance on plywood, when you don't want to use a belt sander, this is a good machine to clean up plywood with on thin veneers. And what you want to do when you use this is it has a sanding pad here which is really just an easy "peal and stick", and these sanding pads which come in a really wide variety of grids are available at your average hardware store. They're a very common machine, they're very easy to find. And so all you need to do to change this pad is just simply peel it off and line up the holes as best you can, and just stick it on, and then you're ready to go."