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So we've got the stair treads here. They're all sanded now and ready for finishing. We're
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going to use a kind of a wipe-on poly finish as you'll see in a future video. But right
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now I just want to show you the procedure we went through for the sanding. As you may
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remember these treads started off as rough lumber and we planed them on the thickness
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planer and the result was pretty smooth. But thickness planers never create a finish ready
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surface. So what you see here is a finish ready surface. The edges are perfectly smooth
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as you saw in a previous video thanks to the pattern routing technique. We've got a little
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bit of a chamfer here. It still looks square but we don't have the problem of the sharp
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edge being there. And things are perfectly smooth. And that's what this video is about
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When it comes to preparing wood like this for finishing, I like to use three different
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kinds of sanders. This is a belt sander and it's the most aggressive of the three here
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and it gets rid of all the mill marks. In this case we started with a 100 grit disc
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They're fairly coarse, they get coarser, but this is a good initial belt for starting
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with wood that's been planed. That's going to remove all the mill marks as I said but
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it's not nearly going to be refined enough. So for the second stage I like to use this
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half sheet inline sander. In this case we found the 120 grit worked the best and it's
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used in a straight line. Most of the movement of this sanding pad is back and forth. There's
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a little bit of swirling action which is not great but most of it is back and forth and
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it's just a matter of passing the sander over until all of the scratch marks left behind
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by the coarser belt have been removed. That gets us about halfway or so to a finish ready
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surface. The next step is a quarter sheet finishing sander. In this case we used 180
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grit paper and once again it's just evenly using this machine back and forth. That's
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going to get things pretty close but there really is no substitute for hand sanding with
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the grain. So as a final step we used 220 grit paper fairly vigorously by hand but only
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in the direction of the wood grain. I don't know if this comes through in the video or
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not but there's no scratch marks. It's perfectly smooth, ready for finishing and really the
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only step left right now is to vacuum these pieces off so they're perfectly dust free
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This is how you sand wood especially in a high profile situation like these stair treads
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or a tabletop or any large expanse of wood that's going to get a lot of attention
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