When you surface wood it may appear smooth however there are lateral marks on the wood where each cut of the knife shaved it. These mill marks need to be sanded off and how you sand it depends a lot on how you are equipped. I use a belt sander with a 80x belt to sand these marks off. Then I use a random orbital sander with 100x sandpaper and then a final sand with 180x sandpaper. If the wood is soft I sand it again with 220x sandpaper because softer wood shows swirl marks made with the orbital sander.
Yes they will.
Dude what kind of planing/surfacing are you doing of you need to belt sand out the machine marks???? That's making a ton of work for yourself. Only time I have used a belt sander on what would become a finished face is to level/flatten a surface too big to work otherwise.Steve Neul said:
That is just standard proceedure to belt sand any surfaced wood in any shop I've ever worked at. Otherwise here and there you are likely to still have planer marks in the wood when you go to finish. I don't do much sanding anymore with a handheld belt sander. I use a stroke sander and it goes quick. The last two shops I worked for before opeing my business used a timesaver sander to sand the planer marks off.
Agree 100% my $0.02woodnthings said:sand from 100 to 150 to 180 or 220.
Or don't sand at all, but use a cabinet scraper....old school.
Read some of these:
http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=ytff1-tyc-inbox&p=sanding%20vs%20scraping%20wood&type=
Depending of the quailty of your planing skills you work may be left with a smooth surface where the wood fibers have been cleanly sheared. Unless you sand in a straight line with a sanding block with the grain direction, sanding marks will show to some extent. Sanding abrades the wood fibers, rather than shearing them off cleanly, so you have to work your way up the grit scale to remove the previous swirl marks if you are using a ROS, random orbit sander.
After the finish is on, and has dried you can sand with a fine grit like 400 or 600 with some water or mineral spirits to get a smooth finish. Buffing with a compound will make it mirror smooth.
If you use a slower drying finish like a poly, you may get dust specks in the dried finish, at least I do. I then use my cabinet scraper to just kiss those nibs off a leaving a very smooth surface.
I believe the original poster is using a hand plane to surface his boards. If so, there will be no cross grain ripples such as you would have using an electrical planer.
The confusion was my fault. I just misinterpreted your original post.
