Nothing Severed Yet

More sawdust does not mean less wood

I made a stupid mistake recently, so of course I am coming to you to share. I accidentally made a part about 1/8" too thick (on my humidor) and needed to get it down to size. Normally I would use my random orbital sander for this, but it wouldn't fit into the space--I had to fold up some manual sandpaper and get it in there. I only had high-grit sandpaper handy, since I normally powersand everything except for the final finish, so I decided to give it a quick try with some of the lowest grit I had handy... 400. Yes, yes, stop laughing. It was a soft wood, and I figured I'd try it for a few minutes and then go buy some real sandpaper if it didn't work.

Well, I got faked out. I was generating HUGE quantities of sawdust, so I figured I must be making progress. An hour (and a sore arm) later I realized my mistake. Higher grit means more cutting surfances means more particles of sawdust... they're just really small particles. It looks like you're hogging off a ton of wood, but of course you're not making much of a dent at all.

So today's obvious advice: use low-grit sandpaper when you have a lot of work to do. You'll thank me for it.