Woodworking Tips, Tools, Hardware, News

It’s that time of the year again where the decorations get pulled out of the garage and the house and yard get decked out with bows of holly and lights. Woodworking comes of its own with these woodworking plans to suit the season.

Create these elegant reindeer figures in minutes with the ready to trace patterns. They stand approximately 3 feet High x 4 feet Long. Click here

Decorate your front yard this holiday season with this trio of notch-together snow crystals. The largest two, standing 42 and 24 respectively when assembled, look great just sitting in the yard. The smallest, measuring 10 across, works well hung from a tree limb or rain gutter. Better yet, build and hang a winter wonderland of small flakes for maximum effect.42, 24, and 10 Tall Click here

The main types of sandpaper used in woodworking

• Aluminum Oxide sandpaper
  by far the most common one used in woodworking. Of all the sandpapers it is the most long lasting of all and that’s because it’s ‘friable’. By that we mean that as you sand, heat and pressure on the aluminum oxide causes it to fragment and therefore create sharp edges for future sanding resulting in a longer lifespan for the sandpaper.
• Ceramic sandpaper
  the hardest of all the sandpapers and really only suitable for really rough sanding of wood. So if you want to take of alot of wood in one hit, then ceramic sandpaper is the way to go. Having said that, it’s also one of the most costly alternatives so I’d go easy on it. Commonly used in most woodworking power tools like power sander belts.
• Garnet sandpaper
  not as friable as aluminum oxide therefore wears out faster but still pretty commonly used in woodworking. As a final sanding paper it’s ideal because it doesn’t tend to keep roughing the surface like aluminum oxide does.
• Silicon carbide sandpaper
  harder than aluminum oxide and garnet but tends to be better used in harder surfaces like plastic and fibreglass. It is also friable but wood isn’t tough enough a surface to fragment the sandpaper surface so it does tend to lose it’s efficacy faster than aluminum oxide.

Sandpaper - the nitty gritty

With sandpaper, the higher the grit number, the finer the sanding result. So as a general rule of thumb you ‘go through the grits’ ie you start with a lower number grit sandpaper and work your way up to the finer sandpapers with the higher grit numbers. In case you are thinking that this means a long and hard slog, most woodworkers will only sand to a maximum of 180grit. For water based stains some woodworkers will go the extra mile to sand to up to 200grit but that’s usually as far as you’ll need to go. As for industrial grade or commercial grade sandpaper, most woodworkers will only really need the commercial grade (industrial grade sandpaper aren’t usually stocked at hardware stores anyway) - unless you’re in a production line the commercial grade stuff will do the job fine.

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