Shoutout to the guy who told me to stop sanding plywood edges by hand

I spent like 2 hours yesterday sanding the edges of some Baltic birch shelves for a closet job. My fingers were raw and the finish still looked rough. A older carpenter at the supply house in Portland saw me buying more sandpaper and laughed. He said get a cheap trim router with a 1/8 roundover bit and just run it along the edge. I tried it this morning on a test piece and it took me maybe 30 seconds per shelf. The edges are smooth and clean and I feel dumb for not figuring this out sooner. Anybody else have a tool they ignored for way too long?

3 comments

3 Comments

jamie77018d ago

Trim routers kick up a ton of dust and you can't really control the depth perfectly on thin edges. Hand sanding may be slower but at least you aren't blowing sawdust all over a finished room.

claire_hart5317d ago

Wait, you're saying a trim router can't handle thin edges when people run laminate flush trim bits on 1/8" veneer all day without issue? @ray_campbell46 is right that a vac setup keeps things clean, but I'm genuinely baffled how you'd get consistent hand sanding across a whole edge without rounding it over.

ray_campbell4617d ago

I mean, most trim routers have a dust port you can hook a shop vac to, so it's pretty clean if you do that. And the bit depth is actually pretty consistent once you set it on a scrap piece first.