Pretty Smooth! Rasps, Scrapers, and Sandpaper - Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration

I'm Tom Johnson, Thomas Johnson Antique Furniture Restoration in Gorm, Maine. This is another one of our series of single subject videos, you know, answering frequently asked questions about restoring furniture. And we're going to talk about abrasives, in other words, how you get your new wood or your repaired wood to the appropriate texture and smoothness for the job. There's a lot of ways to shape wood, and you've seen me use saws, chisels, and hand planes, but you get to the point in every project where then you go to abrasives. A good tool for shaping is a rasp. You might think of it as a file, only when it's for wood it's called a rasp. And they come in all different levels of aggressiveness. This is one with a very, very aggressive teeth. These two are what's called cabinet rasps. They're a little bit finer. And then you have the Nicholson 49 and 50, which are hand cut rasps. They give a really random, really fine, relatively smooth surface. And rasps also can come in little shapes like this, all different shapes and levels of aggressiveness. So after shaping something with a rasp, you might then move to a scraper. This scraper set has lots of different shapes, you know, concave, convex, and pointed, rounded shapes to further smooth out whatever it is you're shaping or forming with the wood. And of course, the most common type of scrapers that people are familiar with are hook scrapers like this one, and it's made for flat surfaces. So I use it a lot for cleaning off glue, or you might use it for paint removal. But that's the most common kind of scraper. In any furniture making, cabinet shop though, you have a whole new set of scrapers that you may not be familiar with. The basic, most basic scraper is called a card scraper, or a cabinet scraper. You sharpen this edge very square and sharp, and then you roll over using a chisel, a hook, and it forms a hook. You bend it in your hand, and you can scrape away wood. You can scrape away a lot of wood with this. This Stanley number 80 is the same principle as a card scraper, but instead of having to use your hands to bend it, it's bent with this screw here, and of course you have handles. So this makes a very, very aggressive scraper for flat surfaces, and you, in my latest video, you saw me using it to do a tabletop. Same idea as a Stanley 80 is this antique Stanley plane. This is a big, heavy-duty plane. I haven't restored it yet. It needs a blade, and needs some tuning up, but this is the same principle, heavy-duty scraping, big handles on it. This might have been used by a floor company or something. So now we get to the main subject here, which is sandpaper, and everyone's familiar with sandpaper, and it's ubiquitous. You can, you'll see artwork made of sandpaper. The other day I saw sandpaper laying on the street, and sandpaper is exactly what it sounds like. It's paper. They put down an adhesive, and then they apply different types of particles to it, which are abrasive, and come in all different grits, or in other words, all different sizes of particles. Probably everyone watching has used sandpaper at some point or another. My daughter started in a shop at seven doing sanding. All new employees frequently start with just sanding, but it's not an unskilled job. It's something that you really got to develop. You really got to be able to see what you're doing, and know when to use one grit, and when to move to the finer grits. Let's take a minute and talk about sanding machines. In my videos, you've probably seen me use the stationary belt sander, which uses these big, big belts for shaping new pieces. Because I work on antiques, I'm always sanding by hand, with some exceptions, some replacement pieces, some new elements, or say if you're making table leaves, new table leaves for an antique table, you might use this big belt sander. You might use a random orbit sander. My sanders are not electric. They're all pneumatic, except for this one. This is a big straight line sander for doing tabletops. These are big, heavy sanders that can really make a surface flat. You may have seen in my last video, from the side of the road to the center of the room, I re-glued the tabletop, and I didn't sand it at all. I used the scrapers, a little bit of sandpaper, 220 at the end. But that's because in antiques, you don't want, you never want an antique to look like it's brand new, just came out of the factory. So I don't use these sanders for that. So now we move on to sandpaper, the kind that most people are so familiar with. Comes in sheets like this, always a standard size sheet. There's a myriad of different types of sandpaper. I mean, I don't even begin to know how many there are. And of course, if you're a homeowner, you're limited to whatever they have at the hardware store, but they usually have a pretty good choice. This type of sandpaper is what I grew up with, and it's called garnet sandpaper, and it's made for hand sanding. Garnet paper is very hard to get anymore. I prefer it for hand sanding, but I don't even use it anymore because I can't, just can't get it. I have a sleeve of it here I'm sort of hanging on to. The other type of paper, the paper you'll most find at a hardware store, is usually called production paper, and it's made for machine sanding. What's the difference between a paper that's made for hand sanding and machine sanding? The garnet breaks down under a lot less pressure, your hand sanding, and as those particles break down, they create new sharp surfaces. Production paper is just a lot tougher, but you can use it on machines and by hand, so it's a good type of sandpaper to have. This is probably silicone carbide or something like that, and I use the grits that I use are 60 grit, very, very aggressive, very large particles. I use 100 grit, and that's sort of like the most common. Some shops use 120, I use 100. After 100, we use 150, so they're getting finer and finer, and you can just touch it and tell how fine it is, and then usually, not always, depends on what you're doing, you'll go with 220, which is super fine paper, and I never sand wood, never ever sand wood finer than 220, because at that point, you're probably burnishing it, and the finish won't take, the finish and stain won't take as well, and no talk about sandpaper would be complete without talking about sanding blocks. This is the standard kind of sanding block, been around since I was a kid. Now, why would you use a sanding block? Well, when you're working on tops or any flat surface, you don't want to ever sand like with your finger and make a groove or make an indentation. You always want to go over a much wider area, take it down, but keep it flat, keep it level. I really like these small black sanding blocks. You'll see me using these a lot in my videos. They really fit my hand well, and when I'm doing small repairs, I can go over a little bit larger area, make sure I don't dish out and make a groove where the repair is. This is a nice soft sanding block, can come in handy sometimes. I got this at an auto body paint store, and I also got these contour sanding blocks. They really come in handy for doing curved surfaces or moldings and things like that. They're different shapes, and the sandpaper can fit right around there, and of course, dust masks. Always wear a dust mask when you're sanding. Even if I'm not always doing it in my videos, it's because I have to talk, but I usually almost always wear a dust mask. Now, also on my bench here, I have this free cut gold, and I have this black wet or dry paper, and those are used for finishing, and that'll be the subject of an upcoming video. So, once you familiarize yourself with these tools and use of this sandpaper, I'm sure your project will come out looking pretty good. So, if you like this video, like and subscribe, hit that little bell icon so you get notified of future videos, and thanks for watching.