Hand Sanding a Woodworking Project

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Kevin and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about hand sanding. Now that we've sanded the piece with the random orbital sander and gotten this nice and flush and all the machine marks out, it?s time to now go for hand sanding which is the final sanding that you'll do and that helps take out any machine marks and just really smooths out the piece of wood. Another thing you're going to do on top of smoothing it out is you're going to do what's called breaking the edges on the piece. That essentially involves a very light round over put on all the edges so that none of them are sharp or have any splinters on them. When you're hand sanding, it?s very important to remember to always go with the grain, that way the scratches that the sandpaper mark is making are always going to be getting finer and finer and they'll always be going with the grain and therefore they'll never be seen and the wood will just become smoother and smoother like this. Long strokes all the way across the piece, not short ones, but just long consistent strokes and then once you've done that, when you come over and you want to round over the edge, you just roll it over until it?s just broken in soft until it?s not sharp anymore. It?s ok if you do more, but just make sure that you do the same on all of it, that way you have a nice consistent look. Same thing on the end. You just go right off the edge and roll it over until it?s a nice, soft consistent edge and then from here, you're ready to do finishing."