Hi, my name's Kevin, and on behalf of Expert
Village, I'm going to talk to you about Hand Sanding. Hand sanding is to be done after
you've done all your machine sanding. Generally, I'd would say, you'd machine sand up to about
150 is a good grit. From there you either can just take 150 hands sanding to there or
up to the higher grits; depending on what your particular project is. From some, nice
little jewelry box or something you may want to sand it up to a higher grit so that it's
really, really nice and smooth to the touch. But if it's for something such as cabinetry
and that, you just want to give it a quick buzz with the hand sanding on a 150 grit and
move on. Right here we've got a piece of plywood that we're going to sand. What we're going
to do is have a piece of cork which is a really good backer for sandpaper. What we're going
to do here, is we're just going to go with the grain as you do anytime you're sanding.
We're just going to clean out all the machine marks if there's any in there. Basically we're
just giving a good scrub down by hand just to ensure that everything is nice and smooth
and we've got all the machine marks out. This higher grit on the hand sanding will reveal,
in general, if there's any machine marks left; if there are we can deal with those as need
be. It's important to remember when you're hand
sanding, nice big, long strokes as I was just doing there. You always want to keep them
as long as possible so that you're not just focused on one little area. Just nice long
with-the-grain strokes. Also, important to remember, even though it's hand sanding it
doesn't seem like it's creating that much dust, it's really important to wear a dust
mask. It may not look like it but you are kicking up a lot of really, really fine particles,
which are the worst ones to go into your respiratory system. You definitely want to remember to
wear a dust mask when you're hand sanding as the final step.