How to Control Belt Sander Speed
Hi, my name's Kevin, and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about speed adjustment with a belt sander.
On a lot of belt sanders you'll have a speed adjustment that you can adjust the speed to go higher or lower depending on the circumstance. In general, the faster the machine is going the more you're taking off. When you slow down you're going to take off less material. The way you can kind of combat against that, if you have a belt sander like this one that doesn't have a speed adjustment on it, is to number one, use a higher grit so that it's taking off less material. The thicker the grit the more it's going to take off, so if you switch to a higher grit a little earlier it's going to allow you to take off less. But, occasionally you'll have a situation where maybe you have a dent in the wood that you've steamed out and you just want to clean up that one little area the rest of it sanded and you don't want to dish it out but it's a little more than handwork will allow you to take out. You use what's called a pulse sanding which is a form of speed control and is generally when you just want to take off a little material but you do need a machine sander to do the majority of the work when it would just be too much to do by hand. And so, I'll show you what pulse sanding is.
We've got the belt sander and our piece ready to go here. When we pulse sand we're just going to be squeezing the trigger and letting go so that the machine is never in constant motion; taking off lots and lots of material but it will just be little by little and we'll just keep checking the piece until we've got the desired area sanded out and flat to where we want it. I'll show you how you're going to do that now.
As you can see, just that little bit of sanding has really done a lot. You can see the contrast right there, that line as to where the previous mark was, and right here. Just that little bit of sanding has really cleaned that up fast. The pulse sanding is just that squeezing the trigger and letting it go and just taking it off just a little bit. It's just generally something you use on an already flatten surface where you don't want to dish out anything but you have one specific spot that needs to be sanded. You just, very little just, take out whatever imperfection was there and then from there go right back to hand sanding.
