44VIDEO Why sanding is key

Well in this video I'm going to start to show you how you can refine your stool

and like all the other operations we've done, the things you'll learn here will

be applicable to all the woodworking you're going to do in the future. So the

main job for me now though is to try to convince you of something that most

people do not believe, especially most aspiring woodworkers, and that's that every piece of wood needs to be sanded. Let me just grab a piece of wood here. So

this is a chunk of white pine. It's planed. It came from the lumber yard like

this. This is about as smooth as a piece of planed lumber gets, and you might look

at that as a beginner and think, well it feels pretty smooth. Why would I want to

waste my time sanding something like that? Why don't I just go straight to finishing? Well the reason is because it's not nearly as smooth as it

looks, and I'm going to prove that to you by taking a close look at some planed

smooth, unsanded wood, and some planed, smoothed, and sanded wood, and you see

what the enormous difference that I'm talking about is. So I'm not being

too particular here, believe it or not, but come around and take a close look at

the kinds of things I'm talking about. So this is that piece of white pine again

and look at that. You see that? That's actually raised a little bit there, and

more disturbing yet, can you see these lines? They're vertical on the screen right now. That's actually caused by the rotation of

the planer blade that turned this from a piece of rough lumber into a piece of

smooth lumber, and it left these little planer marks, it's called. Now here, look

at the top of the footstool. It's even more extreme. Look down here. Look at all those. Those aren't the

horizontal lines you see here, aren't planer marks. That's just areas of the

grain that kind of rose up a little bit, maybe because this board got some water

on it when it was at the lumber yard, or something like that, I don't know. But if

you don't deal with this, you will never ever get a smooth wood finish. So that's

why sanding is important, and I'm going to prove this to you even more

forcefully, so you don't feel any resentment, or anger, or frustration when

you're sanding, because sanding is important. It's vital, in fact, when you

want a proper furniture grade finish. And so I've got a couple of samples here

Both of these, they're cut from that same white pine board, and they're pretty much

identical. Pretty much identical. There's no knots or anything, and if you

see, you can see the marks. It's not perfectly smooth. You can see some

planer marks there. Now where this really starts to show up is when you put a

stain on something, especially a dark stain. I've done this to some of these

other pieces before, just in preparation for this, but here's a dark stain. It's a

dark walnut stain, and it starts to really highlight some of the things. You

see the planer marks. You can see them even more obviously. Look further along

There's plenty of amateur woodwork that is finished like this, and it says

amateur all over it, but it doesn't have to. It doesn't have to. The sanding makes

all the difference. So here's the companion piece of wood. Can you see the

the marks that run across it? The planer marks? Well, even just a few minutes with

a piece of sandpaper, this is what they call 100 grit sandpaper. I'll be

explaining more about the grit ratings and different kinds of sandpaper coming

up soon, but for now, let's just see what happens. Now, I've done one side. I'll do a little bit more. I've done just one side, so you can

see the difference. You see there's the planer marks here, but can

you see how they stop? We have a much more homogeneous wood surface here. Now

this is still fairly rough as sandpaper goes, but even without taking this to its

full smoothness by using progressively finer pieces of sandpaper, there's still a huge improvement over what this board was before

Can you see the difference? Like I said, this is not as smooth as it should

be for final finishing, but look at those marks over here and not over there. So

that is why wood needs to be sanded. Now, it needs to be sanded in the right way

and I haven't done it in the right way here. This is just a little demonstration

to show you. There's a trick to it. Sanding is not difficult

It's not time-consuming, and it's not frustrating as long as you do it in the

right way, and the right way means starting with the right kind of sandpaper

and methodically getting finer as you go up, because if you start with a piece of

fine sandpaper, you're never going to get rid of those ridges and marks that you

saw. And if you start with a piece of coarse sandpaper, you're going to get rid

of the ridges and marks, but then if you jump ahead to something that's too fine, then all you're going to get is smooth scratches left behind by the coarse

sandpaper. So you've got to go incrementally. Sounds like a big deal. In

practice, it's not, and that's what I'm going to show you