- [voiceover] the wood whispereris sponsored by powermatic. (upbeat blues-rock music) - so you probably know, if you've watched the wood whisperer, thati like to make things with curves, i think curves are beautiful, and it's great to breakaway from the straight and square stuff that we typically see. and if you have curves, youneed ways to finesse the curves. if you cut them with a band saw,
kind of like these examples here, you can have a lot of divots, the band saw blade leaves a fairly rough cut. so it's nice to be ableto smooth those out, and also make it nice and regular, so there aren't anymajor dips and valleys. there's a couple ways that you can do it. there are oscillatingspindle sanders out there, which work pretty well,but even a spindle sander,
as it's going around, can create divots. it doesn't create what iwould call a regular curve, something that's nice andsmooth and continuous. so i find one of the best things to use are these little, flexiblesanding strips, right. and you've probably seenme use these before, but what i want to show youtoday is how you make them. they're so easy and quick to make, you could just make them onthe fly, no trouble at all.
generally, for, i guessyou'd call it general use, i like one that's about four inches by the full 11 inches,and we'll hold it on to the piece of material here using one of these spray adhesives, like this. here are the two examples, you can see, really, really simple, you've just got a flat piece of materialthat's fairly thin and has some flexibility to it.
the thinner you go, themore flexibility you have. now, this is a sheet good, i think this is like an mdf core, very thin mdf-core ply. this is actually solid wood,it's quarter-sawn white oak that i drum-sanded down very, very thin, so it's nice and flexiblewith good spring-back. but because the grain's running this way and it's really thin, overtime look what can happen. (wood cracks)
see i've got these cracks in there? it's a darn shame, rightthere, i'll you that. but, you know, it still works. so over the years i've kind ofstarted to favor sheet goods for this, because they reallydo hold up quite a bit better. but look at the structurehere, there's just not a lot to it, right,you've got the flat board, you've got some handles,and that's about it. so, let's make one.
i've got two exampleshere, one is quarter-inch mdf-core plywood, andwhat i wanted to show you is that this thickness,that's a little heavy, right? try to flex it, it's notreally going anywhere. and even if you have,let's see, a shallow curve, like here, you canprobably flex to the curve, but i gotta put a lot of pressure on there to get that to work. okay, so quarter-inch, youmight think it's thin enough,
but generally speaking,quarter-inch, that's a hard sell. i don't know that i woulduse that for one of these. so i have a sheet of eighth-inch plywood. eighth-inch is much easier to bend, nice and flexible, and these are perfect. so this is the materiali'd recommend using if you're buying a sheet good. the other thing you need, justsome scrap stock for handles. the dimensions aren'tcritical, i'm sure someone
who's, you know, smarterat design than i am could come up with a reallycomfortable, ergonomic handle. but honestly, i don't really care. these work just fine, all i would do is ease the sharp edges so that it's a little more comfortable to hold. the other thing you should consider doing is putting a layer of cork on it. now, this is just a roll ofcork, i got a whole bunch
of this stuff that i bought from amazon, right, comes in a big roll like this. that's a great base for thisthing, because if you have just the sandpaper on wood,it's hard to describe, but the feeling isn't quite as good as when you have a little bit ofa soft layer with some give between the sandpaper andyour flat backing, right. so we're going to basically, essentially, make a sandwich, startingwith the plywood and the cork.
so here i've got some sprayadhesive, this is 3m super 77. for this part, this is apermanent installation, you want to make sure thatthis cork doesn't go anywhere. so it's not a bad idea to usethe highest tack you can get, and i believe there's asuper 90, has a little bit more tack than this, but for the sake of getting this demo done,we will just use this stuff. (spraying hiss) okay, little bit on there.
little bit on there, nownormally you're supposed to give this like a minute toset up, if i'm not mistaken, just to make sureeverything, it's kind of like contact cement in thatway, you gotta give it a little bit of time, but let's rush it. - [nicole] you also haveto be 18 to buy that. - you have to be 18 to buy that? - [nicole] part of me (unintelligible). - really? that's weird.
what, are you kids using it to get high? - [nicole] yeah. - nice. - [nicole] no, it's not nice. - i mean that in a sarcastic way. (blade scraping through material) cork is really the perfect material, because it still hasenough density to be nice, smooth, and consistent, butalso has just enough give
to make it more comfortablefor operations like this. now, here's the thing,ideally you're going to want to be able to take this paperoff at some point, right, the paper's going to wear down, you don't want to have to build a whole new flexible sanding strip for that. so, if you can, you maywant to use the lowest-tack material you can find, idon't know if they make something with lesstack than this super 77.
if they do, that's thestuff you want to use, if they don't, here's my solution. (short spraying hisses) just use a little bit. the other thing you may consider doing is possibly putting somepacking tape on here, then put the spray adhesive,and i think the bond between the packing tape and the paper won't be as good as the bond between,
you know, a porous material like this. so there's other ways youcould really make this a little bit more efficient orbetter, i'll do it this way. but essentially you want to be able to take that paper off again someday. and if, you know, worse comes to worst, you rip the cork off and youstart over with more cork. now, handles, ca glue isreally all you need here, but if you've got the luxury of time,
you can certainly use good old wood glue. little bit there. and i've got a quick-set activator here. just drop it in place. put pressure down, spread the glue around. hiyaaa, eeee, uhhn! so once those are attached, you should be able to test it out, and see you've got a good amount of flex there.
so let's head over to thevise, do a little sanding. all right, so using this is just as easy as it could possibly be. put pressure in the middle,you want to grab the back, put your hand on the front and you're sort of flexing it as you go. (sanding and scraping) you can go as fast as you want here. and what i'm going todo just as an example,
one of the tricks i love to do with this is take a little bit of pencil and you just mark linesall the way across. and now start your sanding. and as you look closely at the surface, you will start to see areaswhere the pencil remains. i've got a little spot here, there's another section right here. just a couple more at the front and back,
those would probably go awaywith a little bit more work. but this helps you identifythe spots that are too low. and sure enough, run your finger down, you'll actually feel those divots that match what you're seeing. so it's a combination ofusing the pencil marks and your fingers to tell where there's irregularities in that curve, right. and on this side, i've got a much more,
tighter radius, and thisjust goes to show you that there are limitations to this. if the material is too thick, maybe it doesn't bend well enough to that curve. in this case, this is apretty good curve on here, but because this materialis thin, check it out, boom, conforms right tothe shape of that curve. typically i'll keep thesewith 80 grit, 100 grit, maybe even 120 grit, it'snot usually something
that i put finer grits, like 180 and 220, because usually i'm trying to shape the surface a little bit, to smooth it out. so the lower the grit, thefaster that's going to go. i don't want to make it take longer. and then once i have thecurve nice and regular, i've got other ways that i could sand it to make it nice and smoothup to my final grit. but quick, easy to make,i was on an episode
of "rough cut" that'sactually going to be airing on pbs this fall, and wehad some curves to do, and one of the things we needed to do, we pulled a spokeshave off the shelf, we were talking about different options, and i said, "you guys everuse flexible sanding strips?" and i guess they don't,so, quickly, on the fly, with materials we had laying around, i made one right there on the show.
and it just goes to showyou, you can make them on the fly, technicallythey're disposable, but if you put a little bitof thought into them, you can actually reuse these indefinitely,which is a great idea. (upbeat blues-rock music)all right, so that's about it, flexible sanding strips, i don't do a project thathas curves without them. and i highly recommend you make one. and if you haveimprovements on the design,
let me know about it,because i've been using this basic setup for a long time, and i know there's waysyou can improve on them, for people who are much smarter than me. all right, thanks for watching.