The Bespoke Woodworker

I’ve had a kind of crappy blue plastic borg sanding block for some time, and I’ve been lazy and switched out the paper.  I don’t use it too often, but its finally given up the ghost and won’t really stay closed any more.  I decided to make myself some proper ones with a nice cork backing.

Here’s the original borg crappy one..

The one thing I do like about it is that it is sized such that you can quarter a regular sized sheet, and they fit the sanding block right.

I had a bunch of sheets for cork, because I made myself a small corkboard/takboard for veneer inlay layout purposes.  I had some spare blocks of ash, left over from the bench, but I actually ended up making a sizing mistake and switched to maple.

I drilled a 1/4″ hole, counterbored a larger hole, lined it with 5 minute epoxy. and a 1/4-20 nut into it.

2 small walls on either end, to help retain the sandpaper, were glued on.  My leg vice made an excellent clamp.  Note that the counterbored nut faces down!

Then I cut some rough pieces of 1/4″ cork backing.  (I found it at Staples.)

Plenty of glue, there’s a lot of surface area to grab on cork, and some bench holdfasts make good clamps.

Some over-sized ash blocks, fitted snugly in between the ends, will give me room to sculp something comfortable to hold.

Some bandsaw work, followed up with the oss/belt sander, and voila!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 9:58 am and is filed under Sanding Blocks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.