Shaping Wood with Belt Sanders

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kevin, and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to talk to you about shaping with a belt sander. Shaping is something that can be really effectively done with a belt sander. If you take the belt sander, and you clamp it upside down in a vise like this at the end of the table, you want to make sure that it's clamped in really securely. And then, from there, what you'll do is you'll turn it on and you'll have access to the belt here, and you can actually move the work piece a lot easier than you can move this big, heavy, cumbersome piece of machinery. What we're going to do, is we're going to shape this here, into this shape, in which we've marked it and we've wasted the material with a band saw so that we're not asking the sander to do as much work. It will be a very quick cleanup, and so it's a lot easier to maneuver this piece, than it is to maneuver this big machine. And so I'll show you how to do that in just a second, but as always, be sure to wear headphones and a dust mask whenever operating, especially when it's in this position, because more dust will be coming out this way. So we have the trigger to turn the machine on, and right to the side here there's a little switch that will "lock" the mechanism into an "on" position, so what you want to do is you want to squeeze the trigger, push this in, and it will hold the belt sander spinning, that way we can use both hands to shape the piece of wood."