Originally published at: Budget-priced palm sander does a great job | Boing Boing
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I bought one of those for a one-off job at my in-laws’ house. It worked very well, and was a good value (but I wouldn’t replace my Bosch with it). Orbital sanders seem to be tools where the manufacturing compromises involved in bringing the price down don’t have a huge effect on the performance. The Harbor Freight ones, for example, get higher marks than many of their other power tools.
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I have a black and Decker one that I prefer because it has a rectangular foot which lets it take a 1/4 sheet of standard sandpaper.
Much less wasteful in my mind as I don’t have to mess with the velcro backing versions. Though I admit they’re pretty handy; I have one with a shoe shaped kind of like a clothes iron that uses velcro backing. I would always run out of sandpapers for it when I least expected it… which would be mid-project of course.
Why on Earth would I want to sand my palm??
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That’s the usual form factor for finishing sanders, which are a little less aggressive than orbital palm sanders. Which in turn are less aggressive than belt sanders, which are really the right tool for stripping a table.
What happens is you go through life and every so often you encounter a job for which your current sanding equipment is not appropriate, so you buy something else, And then eventually you buy a new house with an extra room to hold all your sanders.
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when I was a teenager one of my buddies decided he was going to set up a shop in his basement. First order of business; workbench. He got some rough alder planks about 12 feet long , ten inches wide, and maybe 2 1/2 inches thick, or more (we lived in a B.C. town with a mill, so you could get lots of good deals on lumber). This was rough; all the surfaces were uniformly splintered. He had a nice new jackplane and he did a beautiful job dimensioning and finishing these boards, then joined them together to make a solid top. The whole project took him about a month of planing and sanding by hand, then he stained and varnished it. Looked like a boardroom table. “Bud,” I said, “you can’t use this for a workbench”, but he did. The first tool he acquired after he set up the workbench? A belt sander. “Man, if you knew you were gonna buy that…” 
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Sounds like an excellent learning experience for your friend.
I worked for an antique furniture restorer for a while in college, and my boss would have been apoplectic at the suggestion (in my post) that power sanding should play the slightest role in stripping a table. My view is that the whole point of having something made of wood (and not just veneered) is that you can sand or plane it down every year or 10 to make it like new.
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Yeah, that was his idea but he never built anything as beautiful thereafter (as far as I know, lost track of the guy think he went into the clergy ) .
My Grandfather ran a couple saloons around 1900, and our family had a table from one of them. Beautiful round card table with green felt top. It folded, the legs adjusted so the table could be set against a wall like a semi-circular sideboard. My Mom, in a desire to obscure the table’s origin, painted it pink. When I was a teenager I undertook the task of restoring it, without chemical strippers or power tools. There was intricate carving, including beading all around the top…yikes. Fun, though. Sadly, it got ‘lost’ in a move.
Cool! I’ve been looking for a cheap handjob.
That’s tough. We used plenty of chemical strippers, mainly with a methylene chloride base, and went after carvings with stripper-soaked fine steel wool. Oh, and the shop had poor ventilation and no running water. Fun times.
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Why on Earth would I want to sand my palm??
You are absolutely right, I would only only use naturally sanded palms.
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I’ve got that exact model, and it is totally decent. Getting the dust collector off is a bit of a pain, but that’s my only complaint.
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I used steel wool and X-Acto tools, but when I did the one chair we still had I used a chemical stripper. I still retain the image of the paint sloughing off the top rail like a sleeve. I think it was one of those “see how much better this is don’t forget it” moments, much like the clarity with which you remember bee stings (which I understand has some relation to some of the chemicals in bee venom being psychoactive)
stripper-soaked
And when I read this, the allegendary orange pee tapes came to my mind.
Am I such a bad person?
Only for using “allegendary” instead of the more accurate “totally and undeniably real”.
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