DIY Custom Sanding Blocks!

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Every maker shop's gonna do a lot of sanding of whatever material you're working in. And you're gonna need a lot of sanding blocks to do the job well. And you can go out and buy these, but why when you can just do it yourself? Stay tuned and I'll show you how to make a great set of these blocks. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. If you're like me, you've got a lot of things in your maker shop that you need to sand as you progress on a project. Well, I recently saw a tip from Logan Whitmer of the woodsmith team. By the way, that's Logan over on the left there by Dirt Farmer Maggie. That he posted about sanding blocks that he made to use up broken sanding belts. Well, this is the tip that was published and I've got the actual original post link down in the description below. But I took his project here and I actually made a couple of personalizations for it. And I'm gonna walk you step through step how to build one of these. Now, what you're gonna need to build them is some six quarter type of stock, some hardwood stock that is wide enough to be used for whatever sanding material you're gonna use. In this case, it's three inch. I'm using three inch sanding belts and so forth. So it's gotta be at least three inch and thick enough that you can actually build a handhold or it feels good in the hand. And long enough that you can actually get the long enough belt built that you want. You'll also need some simple hardware. In this case, some threaded rod or knobs or ones that have studs already. This happens to be quarter by 20 threaded rod. And you'll need these knife edge brass inserts. Don't get the fine threaded ones. You need these sharp edges that cut in. By the way, when you hear of something that is referring to quarter 20, what we're talking is quarter diameter, but 20 threads per inch. But that's about all the hardware you'll need for this project. Now, what Logan was solving was broken belts like this. These are brand new, of course, but still have a lot of life, let's say in your belt sander, but got torn, compromised somehow, but you wanted to make use of them. So he was using these belts, giving them a second life. Great idea, Logan. In my case, I will use some of the new belts to give me a wider range of grits. The grit that I use on my 1632 jet thickness sander is 100 grit, generally speaking. And I end up with these scrap rolls where there's just not enough length to wrap the entire cylinder. So Logan's idea is a great solution for me to be able to use this material and give it the life it deserves and the use it deserves in my shop. So let's go step-by-step. A very enjoyable afternoon in the shop will yield a great set of these blocks that you'll use for years to come. Let's get started. All right, so the first thing you'll need to do is get the right size stock. And as you can see here, what I did is I started with stock that was about an inch and 5 1⁄8 inch thick. I got it out of my scrap pile. Some nice pieces of thick oak and about three inches wide. And that will allow me to use those three inch belts. Now, I decided to do three different belt lengths or stock lengths, depending on how much I wanted to keep the surface flat or to detail. So I made three sets of blocks, a six inch, a seven inch and a nine inch. So once I've got those blanks and I make the blanks a little bit long to begin with, the next thing you need to do is to drill a one inch hole transverse to the face. And you can see me doing this right now with the drill press. You're gonna leave it intact. You drill it from the end, but leave the tail intact. And so once that is drilled, here you can see the finished main hole. And now once that main hole is cut through there, you need to drill in from the end of the block and drill in the hole for the threaded insert, the knife edge brass insert. And I use a drill jig, a centering drill jig from a company named Dowlett in the adequate size bit. Center on the back, keep everything intact. You don't want to cut off the end yet because you want something to clamp the doweling jig to. Go ahead and drill that drill in. And I drill in fairly deeply past the other side of the hole where the threaded insert's gonna go. I would say I go in a full inch. And the reason I do is so that the tail of the threaded stock when I'm putting in the knob has some place to go and it's not bottoming out before it does its work of clamping. Before I cut off the back of the block to give a half round area for the tightener dowel to go into, I go ahead and put some grooves on the side. Now this is one of my personalizations. If you look at the regular tip that Logan provided, he's using a flat sided block. I just like the way when you use one of these here the way it fills in the hand and the thumb. And I just thought that was a little extra touch there. And in this case here, this was a later prototype. I stopped the groove here, where as you can see on one of the earlier ones the groove ran all the way out the end. We'll see whether that makes a difference down the line but that's up to you about if you use that personalization. Whether you want to stop, you stop a groove here or you want to let it run out. That's up to you. Once you've got those grooves set in the side, go ahead and cut off the end of the block right at the halfway point. So now you have exactly a half round right here on your block. Now I go ahead and using a large round over bit in my router table, I go ahead and place those rounds in here. And you can see those here as I'm on the router table going ahead and place them, place the block up on end, run it across and use a backup block so you don't get tear out on it. And once you're done with that, here's the rounded over ends. And now it's time to drill a hole through one inch dowels. Now Logan uses seven eights. I use one inch, it gripped a little bit better. Although I'm sure if I use a coarser grit, the seven eights would work. I think either one would work, I have both. But you're gonna drill a transverse hole. Now notice one of the things you need to make sure. Yeah, this is just a little thing here to make the dowel last longer. Make sure that you're drilling the hole perpendicular to the grain direction so that as you tighten the knob, it isn't trying to split the dowel. It's actually compressing it and putting pressure into holding the tail ends of the sanding paper as you put that in. Also, another thing that's really important is to end up with rounded back edges. The original plan on these edges right here is pretty sharp and I found it worked better in my case for this type of sandpaper if those had a nice radius to them. And what that allowed is when you installed the paper later to actually kind of pull it into shape without it binding up on the edge and getting a better grip. The next thing you need to do is install the threaded inserts. And since you've cut the back end of the block off, now the pilot hole that's gonna be placed is easy to access. Now I use this little device, which by the way was another woodsmith tip a couple of years ago. And I'll show you how to make one of these in a future episode. But using this little spring-loaded device and a wrench, this allows you to place the insert into the hole perpendicular and to drive it down where it is in the right placement. Now notice that you need to get the insert below the surface of where the dowel is gonna set. Otherwise, you won't be able to tighten up the dowel all the way and grip the sandpaper correctly. So make sure it's below. Now go ahead and install the dowel. And I always make the dowel wider than the width of the block because I'm gonna trim the edges. But here I go ahead and install the threaded handle in and now mark the edges of the dowel where you need to cut them. Go ahead and cut them in. And now it's time to load the sandpaper in around there. So I stand the block up on in, trapping the paper under it, bringing up the edges around the side and tucking it in, and then going ahead and positioning the dowel with the handle and screwing it down tight to tension the sandpaper. Now one other tip, and you're done at this point, but one other tip that I did right away, you'll notice here, before I put the paper on, I marked on the end of the block or somewhere on the block what you need to cut the paper to. So in the future, when I'm replacing the sandpaper with another grit or I've worn out this paper, I don't have to fiddle around again. I already know what the length of the paper is and I can cut very quickly, place a new piece of paper on, and we are ready to go back to work. Well, if you have a shop tip for these type of sanding devices or another great shop tip you'd like to share, do so in the comment section below and we'll help get the word out. If you found this video to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, make sure to subscribe to our channel. And when you do, be sure to ring the bell. That way you'll get notified immediately, approximately every Friday, when a new video comes out on the home, the shop, the kitchen, or great product reviews. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.