Belt Sanding the Edge of a Board

Video Transcript

"Hi my name's Kevin, on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to show you how to edge sand with a belt sander. On the same piece we just leveled out on the perpendicular joint here, we've got the end grain meeting the long grain on the same piece. We've got some pretty heavy saw marks from the table saw in here and those are going to be really hard to get out with hand sanding so we do want to use a machine. If you don't have a big expensive edge sander, what you can do is you can take this belt sander and edge sand it. What makes this one ideal is that with the other belt sander it's very big and heavy and it's really hard to keep it straight; it wants to lean one way or the other. This one is a lot lighter and so we have a much better chance at keeping that nice and flat and keeping this side perpendicular to that one. We're going to use this guy to clean up this end grain and this long grain where they meet together to the point where we can take it to hand sanding. All right, as you can see, we've taken out all the really big saw marks and from here you'd be able to start hand sanding with something around about 100 grit. Once it's like this, with this belt sander, it's a lot easier to keep it from rolling over one way or another, which is a big problem with the heavy weight of the belt sander. And while the big belt sander is great for leveling things, it's really not ideal for an edge situation like this."