Why the Disc sander is so important for knifemaking

hey guys i'm aaron with ailey knives welcome back to my shop today i'm going to show you my favorite tool in the shop that helps reduce my hand sanding time i'm a knife maker i do not love to hand sand it is something that i find some therapeutic value in but i don't love it so i've found a method that really reduces the amount of time that it takes me to hand sand my knives and i'm going to show it to you today do you love to hand sand when you're making knives neither do i so i'm going to take this time to show you how to use the disc sander and why it's so important in the shop i absolutely love my disc sander i use my 2x72 to do the majority of the work but when it comes down to the finer details you just can't beat a good disc i'm going to show you how i use mine and why i use it and at the end of the video i think you'll go and get one throwing my man prin my man apron protects me i'm getting all dirty all righty so we're gonna go to the disc sander i don't feel like doing all this hand sanding you could see i've got some problem spots here that showed up immediately when i started sanding this direction you know it would take forever to get that out hand sanding so i'm going to jump over to the disc sander with these and clean these up on the disc so this is my disc sander setup it's a variable speed motor three phase with a vfd i'm using a tico fm50 super easy to set up and program i'm running this on 220 because it is a two horsepower motor and i wanted to use all two horsepower i didn't want it to dog down i put a one degree bevel disc on the front of it you can get a flat disc or a beveled disc here on a one degree bevel when you're sanding a large knife and you stand up see how it doesn't touch the other side since it's a one degree bevel your blade doesn't touch this side and since this spins if it were perfectly flat and you came across as soon as the tip of the knife touched the other side it would buck your knife so i do a one degree bevel i bought mine from beaumont metalworks it was very inexpensive for what it is and it fits the shaft of almost any motor that you buy so you can run your stock right across the center without it touching the other side one degree bevel is pretty awesome please excuse the mess this is my grinding station i've got my 2 by 72 over here and all of its attachments with all my belts up here and i grind a ton of stuff here i got my disc sander in the middle and i've got my horizontal sander right here so there's an incredible amount of dust over here not to mention i've got my bandsaw right there so this is the dusty area of my shop pretty much no matter any time this is covered in dust even though i do clean it regularly so here's what you do when you get your disc you're going to get it and it's going to be brand new with nothing on it so you buy this 3m feathering compound and this stuff is really cool it's super easy to use you cut the tip off you start squeezing and you turn your disc on and you just go till it's on peel off your old paper and the feathering compound allows you to stick pieces of paper on multiple times so the feathering compound stayed on the disk so that now i could take a new sheet of paper and stick it right to it so just come in here and i stick my new sheet on just like that now i like to use a nine inch disc that allows me to use standard sheets of paper and the cool part about being able to use standard sheets of paper is that you can use any grit of paper that you want to you're not reduced to the standard you know 60 grit pieces that you get for your six inch disc or your 10 inch disc you can use 220 or 500 you can even take this all the way up to a thousand grit now you see that this this is the leftover i'll cut this into a strip and i'll use this and i'll also use these little pieces here when i go to do like finer uh handle sanding and things like that so i never never discard this i always use every little piece so there you go that's as easy as it is to get your paper on there i mean that's pretty darn easy right there now let me show you how i use it and why okay guys this blade right here is just off the 2x72 and you can see my grinding lines okay now i took that to 220 grit on the 2x72 but you'll see the difference when i put this on the flat disc it's going to grind a flat right across this and we're going to it'll instantly show me the valleys and peaks and my mistakes that i made on the 2x72 hear how quiet that is this is one of the reasons that i love using the disc sander it's so quiet and peaceful to clean up your blades on this now if i would have walked over to my hand sanding sled right now i would have probably spent about an hour hand sanding this side just to get these vertical scratches out of the blade okay here we go let me turn this off and we'll inspect this now i just spent one second over there and what you're gonna see immediately are the mistakes so this is the flat that just got sanded there's a mistake here right there well it's not a mistake it just needs to be fixed you can see here actually no let me clean this up okay so you can immediately see where we have problem spots see i've got a problem spot right there and what that tells me is that while i was on the 2x72 and i was grinding across i rocked the blade just a little bit because this is my flat but it took a little bit off there so what i'm going to do on the disc is i'm going to sand this flat until that blends in almost there see i've got a little bit of a dip there now what i do is i apply pressure with this hand don't put any pressure with this hand because if you pressurize this side if you push against this side it'll dig into the edge of your disc and it'll cause gouges this hand is doing nothing but moving the blade in and out and supporting it this hand with these two knuckles is where i'm applying the pressure to the blade and if my problem spots here i'll put a knuckle out here towards the tip of my thumb here and i'll work this area on the flat spot of the disc just like that there's no rotation happening with my right hand i'm not pushing towards the tip or towards the spine it's all just pushing against the flat right here and it's coming out of there real fast so now you can see i've got just a little bit more here and then the tip just needs to be cleaned up also don't be afraid to run the disc right up against your file guide to get this inside ricasso this is a really hard area to gr to get sanded out so i like to do it on the disc and i'll run the disc right up to it and run the disc up and down because you've got one point on the disc right here at its furthest um at the furthest point of the diameter of the disc where it focuses its grind so you'll see right there i'm doing this the cutting edge and right there i'm doing the back right there and i just take it up and down to clean up that inside ricasso see it's perfectly clean now okay just clean this up done perfect there we go how how smooth and clean is that now when i go over to hand sand this it'll be a breeze i'll jump right to oh i'll still use 220 and i'll stand it this direction just to go ahead and speed things up once i sand it this way and i'm at 220 and i'm happy with it i'll switch to 500 and sand at an angle until i'm happy with it and then i'll take the 500 and i'll put in my sanding marks lengthwise but that's pretty good and it would it take me about a minute you know if i wasn't videoing this it took me a minute to do this it does blow a whole sheet of paper to do each side of a knife so you're looking two extra sheets of paper but think about all the time you're saving and time is worth money so my disc sander has been out of service for a while because i've been lazy when i say lazy i mean lazy because this is all you got to do to bring it back into service change off paper put a little feathering compound on there and stick a new sheet on trim it you do want to trim it as close to the disc as you can there you go done i save all these and i do use these i use all these little pieces of sandpaper safety glasses direction we're spinning here oh that happens to be perfect oh the disc sander is so amazing what a treat use the right tool for the right thing man well i can't camera legs in the way there we go now i'm straddling the camera leg to get in here but ouch see hard to do it when you got a camera in your way the way i do this is i put pressure with my fingers with my knuckle and my thumb you don't want to push with your left hand with my left hand here because that'll cause a gouge in the blade on the edge of the disc this hand is just supporting the handle of the knife and i'm doing all the pressing with my finger and my knuckle against the grinding wheel and also i can feel any heat building up now see i can see a spot right here where i got a little bit of trouble on my 2x72 then i'm going to have to grind out of there dip it in water come back yeah you can see that spot right there just this spot where i got a little crazy on my 2x72 [Music] so now you can see i reduced it by about half we'll go in again we'll sand out sand that out some more it looks like i got a little spot down here too so i must have a high spot right here because i got a spot here and a spot here that i'm not quite getting sanded yet [Music] it's looking better i think this uh papers toast let me get a new piece yeah that paper is toast already grab a new sheet that is the thing about disc sander it burns through paper but if you don't like hand sanding whoa this is the ticket it just really cleans things up fast there we go save my scraps and we're ready to rock back in business first time you touch it it could bite so be careful oh yeah that paper was shot this is gonna clean up real fast now all right i think we're there see got a little tiny spot right there but other than that i think i got every single one of the uh 2x72 scratches out that's what i cared about that's just beautiful man that's going to make hand sanding just a breeze i got two knives done there's that much water on the floor now think about it if there's that much water on the floor this is a disc that's spinning and it's flinging water off in all directions so it's pretty imperative that you wear safety glasses when you're working with this guy right here but i just did two entire knives i used four sheets of paper and there's about that much water because i consistently dip in my water before i bring it back because this is effectively wet sanding in this station you are wet sanding this is wet dry paper that i'm sticking on there and i'm dipping it in water i'm keeping it really wet and it's more like you could almost do lapidary work on this thing right here it's amazing you guys should definitely go out and get a disc sander i'll bet you brian over at houseworks you know the guy who does the revolution the do-it-yourself 2x72 i'll bet you someday he'll build a cool diy work surface for the disc sander at least if he's not making plans for it he should wink wink i hope you hear me brian all right so we have a long medium and small on the long man i just can't express to you how light these are i mean these are like these these are just like featherweight knives i used a hybrid c-tec material which is a honeycomb material and this is kind of a greenish color with an elm burl really neat burl i'm going to bring you up close to show you these also each one of them this one right here has a sharpened clip it has mammoth bark which is the outer layer of mammoth and a really neat stabilized maple handle with a a really cool knot that goes right through from one side to the other on the book matched scales so that one came out really cool and this one is really neat i love this knife i love how it fits in the hand this is fordite let's bring it up real close and show that to you

Channel: Aleeknives

Views: 64,040

Keywords: Aleeknives, knifemaking, knife making, bladesmithing, blacksmithing for beginners, disc sander

Id: RTj0RY4-HyE

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 08 2021