Are we done with sanding? No. Are we ready to apply Rubio Monocoat? No. Are we happy with today's progress? Yes!
Did you know that sandpaper comes in 12 grit? It looks like golf cleats. Or like a caramelized nutty topping on a delicious dessert.
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| Ready for sportsball? No, just very aggressive sanding. |
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12 grit sandpaper. This one is loaded with crud. Next disk, please!
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12 grit sandpaper is used to get rid of huge globs of shellac on old hardwood floors. We didn't think our floors were so bad as to warrant starting with 12 grit sandpaper, but guess what, sports fans: we were wrong. Kadee at
Pete's provided us with a flowchart of possible sanding options. The worst case scenario had us starting with 16, cross sanding with that and then sanding along the grain before working our way up to 24 (cross and with the grain), 36 (with the grain), 60 (with the grain), 80 (with the grain), and ending with 100. Surely not, we thought. 24 would be fine, right, as long as we did a cross sand first? Wrong. A test sanding patch in the dining room revealed the depth to which we would be traveling down the path of previously untested sandpaper grits. And yes, this meant using 12 in the edger and starting with 16 in the drum sander. (This is the lowest (largest?) of all possible grits for each machine.) This was necessary because of the variations in height all along the floor and the huge buildup of shellac and wax, especially along the trim and in the corners. For perspective, Mr. H. says he'd use 220 grit or higher if making a cutting board.
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| Untouched floor! |
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Test pass in the dining room around 8:30 this morning. We practiced with the machines
on a piece of plywood in the driveway first! |
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Gross!
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What does this mean? It means that as we progress up the chain with each grit, we have to sand the floor across the grain at a 15-degree angle and then sand with the same grit with the grain until we get to...36 or so. It's basically double the work. As recommended by Pete's, we stop and vacuum between each grit step. Also, edging is a tough job - very aggressive machine - and the tool we rented at HHD (the horrible Home Despot near our house) is not the same as the one we used in our class at Pete's. (Naturally, the edger from HHD is worse, as is our every experience there.)
Where do we stand now? We're all the way up through cross sanding with 36 grit! We did 5 passes over the floor today, not to mention working our way up from 12 to 24 in the edger. (The edging pass is the last pass in any current grit.) We will sand with 36 with the grain tomorrow and see where we land. Another pass (cross and straight) with 24 could be needed, which would mean another trip through the 36 pass also. We'll just have to see how it looks. What we're after is totally clean floors that can accept Rubio Monocoat. You can see that we're not there yet. In person, it's plain that there are areas still hanging on to the previous finish. The boards aren't even anymore. Parts of the floor that sit lower than the rest haven't been hit hard enough with sanding to relinquish their finish. We'll get there.
We took the terrible edger back to HHD and will get a different brand tomorrow, perhaps at Menards or Bliffert. In the morning, I'll probably start the regular with-the-grain pass using the 36 grit while Mr. H. hunts down an edger.
We also need to address the corners by hand as they can't be sanded with a big machine. Mr. H. has a triangle-shaped sanding head on his electric multitool, so we'll probably use that along with various scrapers and sanding blocks.
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