Auto Body Sanding Tools

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Joel Jones from Jones's Auto Restoration in Ridgefield, Washington and today I'm going to talk to you about sanding tools and some equipment. The first item that you're going to want to look at getting is what's called sanding board. This is the basic fundamental building block of any kind of body work project that you're going to do. It's inexpensive; it's really available at any tool supply place; hardware stores has them and essentially, you stick the sandpaper on this surface and you just sand away. Because it's so long and it's got a big reinforcement, it distributes the pressure from your two hands evenly across the panel to make it flat. This is a manual version. Once you've mastered the manual version, you can step up to an air-powered version. Uses exactly the same sandpaper that comes in standard sizes and this one runs off of an air, of compressed air. The track just reciprocates back and forth and you hold onto it exactly the same way and it sand. This removes material very very quickly; so I definitely recommend understanding the principles manually before you step up to any kind of power tool. Moving on; you inevitably run into kinds of contours on the body panels that require you to get into curve areas. So what I recommend is you use kind of a dense foam sanding block. These are made by Dura-Block; there are other brands out there and you can buy kits that are relatively inexpensive. They come in all different shapes and sizes and don't be afraid to use your imagination when you're trying to figure out how to sand intricate body seams and stuff like that. Sometimes you need to just go, dig through some hardware or find the right curve and use that. But, never use just your hands or fingers. What that will do is that it will create waves in the body panel from all the pressure points from your fingers. So always use some kind of a block. Blocks come in various lengths and sizes; the longer and flatter the block, the flatter the panels going to be and the nicer your paint job is going to be in, in the end. These dense foam blocks are good for when you get into the finer grit sandpapers to use as wet. They won't absorb moisture; they dry out and work very very well for wet applications. I recommend you switch over to a wet sandpaper at any grits above 400. The sandpaper won't clog when it's wet and you get a much nicer finish. In addition to that, I don't recommend using any kind of air tools or power tools above, say about a 220 grit paper. At that point, the most of your rough body work should already be done and you should just essentially be trying to make the panel as smooth and as soft, as flat as possible. There's in-line sanders; like the ones that I've shown here and then there's also what I called DA sanders. These are excellent tools. The downside to them is they don't have enough of a surface area to actually make the panel flat. But what they do do is they kind of orbit around; they have a dual action; hence the name DA and it doesn't give you any long sanding scratchers that can potentially show up with this. So it takes, it takes a round circular pad, you can get at any kind of various grits. These are excellent for roughing in body work and also removing any kind of long sand scratches and getting a panel prep for paint. These tools you use for actual primer, surfacing, stuff to get the panel ready for paint. These get the sub-straight and the panel ready to accept more coats of paint. You really wouldn't want to spray a color coat or clear coat on a DA'd surface. You would see a little, tiny circles all throughout inside the, under, beneath the surface. When you're doing your body work, sometimes you have a, a very large amount of bando or body filler that you need to take off. And one tool that does that very very quickly is what I call a cheese grater and essentially it's exactly what it is. It has big teeth on it and it's very flat; it's got a metal frame and this very very quickly scrapes down all the excess body filler in; then it gets you down to the point where you can switch over to the long board. I'm going to talk a little bit about sandpaper. When you buy sandpaper, you can get it with a dry back; you can get it with an adhesive back; you can get it in all different types and sizes. I recommending just taking with basics. With an adhesive back, so that it sticks to your blocks and on a roll so that you can use the same roll for all the different lengths of blocks. So what you do; you will just grab it; you pull it out and then you stick your block right on it; just like that and the block will stick and then you can just tear it off. Then you fold that up like that; fold that end up like that and there you go, you've got your block ready to go to sand on whatever. You can loop whatever length do you want, the power sander, the in-line sanders and it will also; you can roll it around your round block like that and use it to use that. So it's very versatile. Now for the DA, you're going to need to use a different style of sandpaper. It will come in discs like this and this is a very coarse grit that you would use to knock down heavy body filler or anything like that and you just peel off the back and it's got the adhesive right on it. It's extremely frustrating if you, if you buy sandpaper that doesn't already have the adhesive on it. You can buy some adhesive spray; but I'm going to recommend that you don't bother with that. This thing will start spinning and then the discs will come flying off and it's just as, becomes extremely frustrating. So, you peel this guy off; you peel off your old paper; stick that on there and away you go. You're ready. Finally, I'm going to talk about kind of some organization of your sanding tools. There's nothing more frustrating than having all of your sanding tools scattered all over the place. So what I recommend is you get some kind of a cart on wheels that you can take directly to your project that has all of your sandpaper dispensing on it and all of your blocks. This way it, it's never more than an arm's reach in length and you can always get to more sandpaper."