Turn Your Scrap Wood into Cool Sanding Blocks

so in today's video I'm going to show you how to turn your scrap wood into sanding blocks now before we do that I want to give a shout out to Cerritos College this is one of the projects that we make in the intro 101 class and I heard recently that they changed class up a little bit and they no longer make sanding blocks so which is too bad because this is really handy around the shop so if you live in the Southern California area you really owe it to yourself to go check them out they have a really awesome woodworking program so the first thing we need to do is to mill our stock to size we're gonna take them down to 3/4 of an inch thick by three and a quarter inch in width and 5 and 1/2 inches in length now this will fit half a sheet and if you want to fit a whole sheet then cut them to 11 inches long this is the size that they make at the college I find it a little bit too big for everyday use but it could be handy when you're sanding big projects [Applause] [Music] so I have my pieces meal two 3/4 inch thick now I'm going to show you a little tip how I cut them to size I'm going to turn you guys a little bit more anal you might lose a few friends but a your works I'm going to look a little bit cleaner so the first thing I do in stead of ripping them right to three and a quarter I'm going to set it a little bit bigger maybe a 300 quarter plus 1/16 I'm gonna rip them and then I'm going to cross cut them because every time I cross cut there's a little bit of fuss then I'm going to come back and then I remove that [Music] now we're going to set the fence to a three and a quarter and trim off the fuzzies now it's nice and clean all the way around so I'm gonna be cutting my grooves on the table saw I got my flat top tooth blade in there so I'm gonna run it through twice I'm gonna call once this way and I'm gonna flip it 180 never run it through again this way my groove would be there on Center so it's very important that all your stock will be exactly the same thickness so if you're gonna be running through the planer hopefully all of them run through at the same time so my blade is set to approximately 5/8 of an inch in height I also marked out a quarter inch in my blocks that's what my groove is going to be now when I set up I noticed that a lot of people when they set up they like to sit the fence or the blade to this side of the line now I don't like to do that the reason why is because when I'm cutting and for any reason I come off the fence I would be making my groove a little bit bigger now it's okay as woodworkers to fix problems or learn how to fix problems but I think it's just as important as to prevent problems so I'm gonna set my fence on the blade on this side of the line because when I'm cutting and if it comes off the fence a little bit well I'm cutting on my waist side now I can run this thing through a hundred times and I would have a hundred chances of getting it better and better and consistent in my width if I have my plane on this side of the line if I run it 300 times I have a hundred chances of messing it up now I want my groove to be very consistent because when I cut my wedges I want all my wedges to fit in every single one of my my blocks [Music] it's time to glue the blocks with cork now I'm using eighth inch cork I got these on line is usually scum one foot by three feet two sheets of this will take care of twenty half-size Sammy blocks now I have my spacers ready it makes it easy when I'm sitting in the blocks I cut them to about a little under 5/16 now I'll be using contact cement by 3m I've tried a lot of different brands and 3m works the best by far you can get them in the bottle or in a spray can for a big job like this I prefer rolling it on it's less messy than spraying all over the place especially one them with the blocks I want to only on the surface and not on the edges now 3m also make a spray adhesive it's a great product but but not for this because cork is porous contact cement works the best like when you're sanding now he builds up heat you don't want the cork to determinate now because this is water base I weight down my roller and I kind of dried it off really fast I also have my gloves I always like to protect my hands because you never know when I get another call to do some hand modeling job gotta be really generous with this and I'm going to separate them before I get stuck together just like that I'm going to touch up each one okay so now that is dry I'm going to start applying these onto the cork I'm going to start off maybe like eighth of an inch away from here this will help me guide it so now I'm going to put a backing foot on here and now I'm going to take my knife and just cut them all apart now we never take my knife and go right up to the edge and trying to cut it clean because cork is so brittle that no matter how sharp your knife is it always leaves a little bit of a there's a little bit of a floozy here it's not much but again I'm just being anal and I don't have too many friends so I'm just gonna barely touch it because I'm not gonna worry about any kind of glue that's left over on the edge here because when I put the other side on then I'll take care everything all at once okay now that we have everything sanded which is going to repeat what we did the first time imma lay all these out now that I have cork on both sides I am going to have a real light setting remove some of the glue [Music] [Applause] this one's okay a little bit of glue here yeah your good luck doesn't take much now the next step is to cut our wedges to fit into our groove so I want to take a couple few measurements so this one here for two and a half still 242 and a half this one's forty-three this one's forty-four suppose forty-three so it's pretty kind close I came only about thousands of minutes away so my target is gonna be two four three now to make my wedges I have my stop mailed up to three quarters of an inch thick because my groove is only five eighths so it will be sticking up about an eighth of an inch I also won my wedges to fit into my groove at a three degree on each side so it's kinda like coming in this way I'd like to use the longer board because it would fit too and also if you're making the full size it would also accommodate for that too I like to use a while along the board because it's safer I think trying to cut tiny little witches dish what through a table saw so now the first thing I would do is I would change my angle to three degrees and I'm gonna make my first cut so I want to mark out where I want to cut so I have my three degree tapering down this way and I want to tapering down this way and then the bottom of the groove would be 5/8 from here to here so I have my square set to 5/8 I'm going to make a little line here first so from here it has to be a quarter of an inch so I said my ruler on here so a quarter of an inch would be right about here I get this set at 3 degrees and I'm going to draw my line approximately right yeah now I don't know if you can see that but I put my blade right on the line kind of leaving the pencil line a little bit and then I can always stick it in later I'll just make the first cut and see how it goes [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so doing a little bit too tight so it's a still a little bit too high I need to lower it about 1/4 of an inch so maybe I'll go tap it over sixty fourth of an inch and see what happens okay I'm going to tap it over so now I'm gonna have to go flip it over so the angle is this way she has to hear more about you do it with this thing stupid Oh [Music] - loose so bring it back just here [Music] [Applause] oh that's perfect this is what I want now this is pretty much what I want it just barely hits at the bottom and it doesn't fall out nice and snug like this now I'm just going to cut the rest of them [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so the last thing is to cut them a link now I'm gonna cut them to six and a half inches you can cut them any length you want now you can stand a wedge a little bit give it a little bit of personality get this wound up to this line here Ben dude [Music] wait yeah so I went ahead and made some semi blocks that can send concave parts this comes in really handy it's a lot better than trying to put some sandpaper around your finger and go in there and trying to sand those parts so if you want let me show you how to make this so the thickness of these material is really determined by the tuning that you have so have an eighth inch roundover so my thickness is a quarter of an inch and then this one's 3/16 so this is 3/8 then I have a quarter inch roundover so this is 1/2 inch and then I have 5/16 which is 5/8 and then 3/8 that will give me three quarters and then I have a 7/16 inch bit and then this would be 7/8 and we can just go on first I want to thank all the people who supported my channel by going to my website and purchasing my online class of the coffee table it really helps with the cost of this studio I sincerely appreciate that I want to put out more videos on YouTube but I do have bills to pay so if you want to support my channel at least hit the like button and subscribe I know this is a simple project video but I see hope you got something out of it so take care and I'll see you in the next

Channel: William Ng

Views: 66,363

Rating: 4.9467006 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking, how-to, building, tools, school, learning

Id: KDFwr371o5I

Length: 17min 48sec (1068 seconds)

Published: Sun May 31 2020