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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 get coarser but this is a good initial belt for starting with wood that's been planed
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That's going to remove all the mill marks as I said but it's not nearly going to be refined enough. So for the second stage I like to use this half sheet inline sander
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In this case we found the 120 grit worked the best and it's used in a straight line
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Most of the movement of this sanding pad is back and forth. There's a little bit of
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swirling action which is not great but most of it is back and forth and it's just a matter
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of passing the sander over until all of the scratch marks left behind by the coarser belt
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have been removed. That gets us about halfway or so to a finish ready surface. The next
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step is a quarter sheet finishing sander. In this case we used 180 grit paper and once
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again it's just evenly using this machine back and forth. That's going to get things
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pretty close but there really is no substitute for hand sanding with the grain. So as a final
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step we used 220 grit paper fairly vigorously by hand but only in the direction of the wood
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grain. I don't know if this comes through in the video or not but there's no scratch
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marks. It's perfectly smooth, ready for finishing and really the only step left right now is to
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vacuum these pieces off so they're perfectly dust free. But this is how you sand wood especially
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in a high-profile situation like these stair treads or a tabletop or any large expanse of
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wood that's going to get a lot of attention. Thanks for watching. Click here to join the
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