But the right choice often comes down to where you'll be installing your new flooring. The best way to achieve this is by having a very sharp scraper. Here is a rough guideline for what the hwrdwood grits do: 12grit available for edgers only Starting grit for floors with heavy adhesive or multiple coats of floor paint 16grit Starting grit for floors with heavy shellac finishes or single layers of paint and sometimes for very old, hard maple floors this is an unfortunate but common starting grit here in the Twin Cities. The place where the straight scratch from the drum sander meets the circular scratch hardwood sanding machine 10 the edger can show up as a line, just as distinct as one of those outfield mowing lines. So the floor needs to already be clean machin flat and very smooth hardwood sanding machine 10 order for these to work. You can witness special bargains and finance friendly prices from some of the reputed vendors out there.

Powerful Hand Wood Sanding Machine 2. Endless belt leaves the floor silky smooth and makes the machine easy to control. L-shaped for easy reach, this powerful machine has an onboard light making it easy to operate in corners, halls, dark cupboards, etc.

Excellent for hardwood floors, lighter and less aggressive than the Viking edger, it is also adaptable for use on stairs. Table Top Finish on Your Wood Floor — this machine has revolutionised the standard of wood floor finishing. Floor Sander Hire London. Call Get a Quote. Best Floor Sanders for you? Viking Edger L-shaped for easy reach, this powerful machine has an onboard light making it easy to operate in corners, halls, dark cupboards, etc.

Mini-Edge Edger Excellent for hardwood floors, lighter and less aggressive than the Viking edger, it is also adaptable for use on stairs. Stop the sander and carefully inspect the area you just sanded. If that section of floor looks completely bare and clean, even at the edges of the boards, then you have successfully determined that the grit sequence for sanding your floor is 36grit, 60grit and 80grit. If the area you tested is not completely clean, then you have determined that your floor will Mini Wood Sanding Machine China need MORE than just that grit formula.

So, pick a new spot on the floor again, preferably a spot in bad shape and try a more aggressive test. Look at your sanded test area. Is it bare and clean? If yes, then yay! Most floors in the Twin Cities were installed prior to and will need a 24grit start when using a v sander. Think your floor is in bad shape? What if it fails that test? Keep testing with more aggressive combinations until you find one that gives you clean wood by the time you reach 36grit. We already know that they will adequately remove scratch from 36 grit, so limit your testing to figuring out your starting point.

As mentioned, doing a professional job on your floor will probably entail four sanding passes, but you do have some flexibility in choosing the abrasive for your first pass. The grits available for the edger are 12, 16, 20, 36, 60, and Most floors in the Twin Cities were installed prior to and will require a starting grit of If your floor is newer and you are convinced that you do not Sanding Machine For Wood Screwfix Exp need to begin that aggressively, do this test: put a 36grit belt on the machine and go to the worst section of the floor.

Spend minutes and sand a 7' x 8' area. Now, turn the machine off and look at that sanded section. If you can honestly say that there is no finish left on that floor and that you cannot feel the board edges when you run your hand across the wood, then you can proceed to sand with 36grit, proceeding through 60 and But if there is still visible finish in the test area, you are better off doing a fast pass at 24grit to get the bulk of the finish off before changing over to 36grit and removing every last bit of it.

Remember, 60 grit and 80 grit are not designed to remove finish—all they do is smooth out scratches. If you have the reverse—a severely scarred, uneven, water-damaged or painted floor—then you may want to consider not only starting with a coarse grit, but sanding at an angle to the grain. This is an important exception to the rule of always sanding with the grain of the wood.

It only applies during the rough sand stage, but it is a very efficient way to speed the process of cleaning and leveling an old floor. Because of wood's natural tendency to shred and splinter when it is sanded off-grain, the sander can remove more wood with the same amount of effort when positioned at an angle.

The downside of using this procedure is that, after you make an entire pass at an angle, you must follow it with another pass parallel to the grain at the same grit. Newly installed floors can be rough-sanded with 36grit parallel to the grain. The rule to remember is that, no matter what grit you choose as your starting point, you must sand, in order, with every grit that is finer than your starting point.

For each grit pass you make on your floor, you will begin with the drum sander. Make sure you read Working with sanders and edgers. If you have the luxury of having two people on the project, one on the drum and one on the edger do not use both machines in the same room at the same time! It is better for the drum sander to go first, finish that grit in the first room and proceed to the second, and then let the edger begin, alone, in the first room once the drum sander has moved on.

For every grit you do, drum first and edge second. This is largely because the edger can sand out drum marks that you might leave during the transition at the wall edge. In older homes, where there has been significant foot traffic in the main field of each room, but no wear at all around the perimeter, you may find that there is a whole lot more finish around the edge. Just drop down to the next coarser grit on the edger only. Move quickly and use that coarse grit to remove about half of the finish.

Then continue with the grit you were supposed to use that matches the drum sander pass you just finished —now the condition of the edge area matches the condition of the field and you can proceed with your planned grit sequence. Every time you finish a grit you need to vacuum, or at least sweep all the surfaces you just sanded. This is because the pieces of sanding mineral fall off the abrasive and litter the floor after every grit pass.

Even though you may have moved on to a finer grit, those big, coarse particles from previous passes are still being driven into the floor by your drum and edger. Even under your fine paper, they continue to grind their 16 grit cat-scratch into the floor, and you will wonder where all those big, deep gouges are coming from.

In both those cases, particularly on the edger, you need to work harder to make sure that all evidence of your sanding is removed, which is easier to do when you can sand to a finer grit. Maple is so hard and dense that any scratch left in the wood is held cleanly and crisply. Those crisp incisions make a snug little crevice for stain, or even natural finishes to accumulate. Once you have pigment or product built up in that scratch, it becomes twice as visible, particularly the curved scratch from the edger.

As your floor gets progressively cleaner, it gets harder and harder to tell where the sanders have been. So, we recommend using a series of light pencil lines drawn directly on the floor before you begin 60grit and again before you begin 80grit. The drum sander will erase any pencil lines it touches and the lines that remain will show you exactly where you need to edge. This also keeps your rental of that extra sander down to an absolute minimum.

Carbide scrapers are great, but can be expensive. Multi-tools like the Fein or Bosch have small, triangular sanding heads that also work well. No matter how long you have been sanding floors, no matter how skilled you are with the edger, there will still be edger swirl left around the perimeter of your room, even after you finished sanding through grit.

After you finish your final edger pass, you should inspect the entire perimeter of your project on hands and knees and with a flashlight if necessary to locate every last bit of visible sanding scratch from the edger. When you find it, remove it by hand-sanding with 80 grit. A palm or orbital sander is more powerful than your hand and will so over-polish the floor that, while the swirls will be gone, the texture of that area will be much smoother and more Sanding Machine For Wood Screwfix Note closed than the areas that were done with either the drum or the edger.

These areas will not allow finish to absorb as easily or deeply and will have a distinctly different tone than the surrounding floor. Do you know how, when you look at the outfield at a baseball game, they stripe the field just by mowing adjacent areas in different directions?

The place where the straight scratch from the drum sander meets the circular scratch from the edger can show up as a line, just as distinct as one of those outfield mowing lines. Once that coat of finish is down, it takes a lot of work to fix this problem, so the idea is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

And prevention is easy, but it needs to happen just as you are at your most exhausted. But before you begin your final cleanup, you need to use a pole sander or a buffer to do one final, blend-sand over your entire floor. Using or grit, you will put a shallow, but most importantly uniform scratch pattern over the entire floor. This will fool your finish into believing that only one machine left its mark on your floor and it will absorb uniformly into the wood and will look consistent and blotch-free everywhere.

Getting all the dust off is more important than we can ever say. Pay particular attention to the dust in the cracks between the boards and at the very edges of the room, especially the gap under the baseboards. Finish has a way of finding little hidden pockets of dust and pulling it up and spreading it along with your mop head.

Try not to use the plastic wand on your shop vac — it can leave plastic residue marks where it scrapes on the floor. Find a vacuum wand with strong, soft bristles. Buy us a coffee Shop for products online. We love educating people, but it's expensive. And we're uncomfortable taking questions about products you bought on Amazon. Most first-time sanders are horrified when they see the sheer aggression of the sandpapers we use for floor sanding.

And many of them flat-out refuse to use anything coarser than a 36grit sandpaper on their floors.

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