Sanding Tips | Sand Like A PRO

[Applause] [Music] all right today I'm here with Curtis Hicks from Unida Curtis has been in the business for over 20 years abrasive business and I want you know Curtis just you know to walk us through give us a little bit of um some tips and tricks you know what races we should be doing and so I think you're going to talk about um cloth paper and film and kind of walk us through that and give us some advice on what we should be using so we got some samples and um just give us a little bit of your background too Curtis yeah well I've been in the abrasive business for 30 years um started out encoded which this is considered coded uh then I went for a couple years into the shape of wheel business which it all ties in shape of oils are like a a fiber type wheel that will mold and actually start shaping to a product like it's big in where they're manufacturing trim and stuff like that they're feeding this in its shapes and Sands that and then 20 years ago I uh went to work with you native so I've been here 20 years now and that got me back into the decoded aspect of the business we have cloth paper and film and you know um so we got film Tech I'm from Anita we've got echostorm and I'm not sure what the cloth is called but can you just um give our viewers just a little bit of advice and um kind of some technical background about these three products and what you should be using and why sure it is I'd like to talk about costs I think a lot of people tend to use it when they probably shouldn't so just a quick 101 on it is cloth is a is a really good product for longevity nothing's going to outlast it because of the durability of the car off the problem with cloth though is that you can't see it looking at it but it's just like a pair of jeans it's woven so every time a thread goes over another thread you're creating a little bump and you know how sanding is anything you do it'll it'll feed right through and show up on the part so although you're getting good longevity out of this the Finish typically isn't real good so really for what your customer base is doing I wouldn't really recommend cloth for too many applications but as far as longevity you can't beat it now when it comes to finishing paper has traditionally been the best product to use because now you're coating the abrasive grain onto a nice flat pressed surface problem with paper is if you're doing Edge work things like that you tend to tear it right to me the greatest thing that came out and it's you know it's the most it's going back a while now but it's the most newest Innovation when it comes to substrates to codon is film so film is basically a plastic but even though paper looks nice and flat and it is because it's pressed nothing is flatter than the plastic so to me this is the best product to use I know you guys do a lot with film Tech because what you're getting out of film you're getting the Best of Both Worlds you're getting the longevity typically you'll get out of cloth but yet the finish out of paper so you get excellent edgeware won't tear but yet you're getting a really nice flat surface to coat to so you're getting a very good finish so think what it really comes down to and and in the cabinet repainting industry what we're really after you know in somebody's home is a factory like finish and and so I guess what I'm hearing from you if you want that factory-like finish an ultra flat finish I mean it starts with an abrasive I guess is what it is and all the braces are everybody just needs to keep in mind it's not complicated it's just a cutting tool it's no different than a bandsaw blade it's no different than a router or shaper You're simply taking tons and tons of little knives and you're adhering it to a substrate so when you're cutting things what do you want to do you want to run cool because heat is the biggest detriment heat is the Kryptonite like this to Superman that's what heat is to sandpaper once you heat it up you start loosening the grains and that's when you start getting shedding and that's when you start loading and a lot of things go wrong so in that point if I had to give anybody any tips about sanding especially on what you're customer base is doing my first advice is don't use too much pressure if you're using a three inch by four sander or if you're using a five inch sander just let the weight of that machine do the work and look I get it if I go home and do drywall or something I'm sitting there and I'm I'm going to town at it but I'm creating a lot of friction so just letting away that sander do the work is is going to do the job these tools are designed to crack and resharpen that's the term in the industry is called friability and that is a major term in our industry so what that means is you're all abrasive grains start out sharp because they're electrostatic coated so when they're coated that that electrostatic actually the grains come in on the bottom and they flip up and stick to the resin on the top but because electrostatic coating you're getting the heavy side of that flipping up so you always have a sharp tip but where we really I think Excel is we focus on wood 75 of our businesses would so we have some very special grains so a lot of companies will use a brown aluminum oxide because when that crack that tip cracks it's going to dull and that's really good for metal you get better life and it does okay on wood nothing wrong with it does okay we want our grains constantly once that tip cracks we want it to resharpen into two new cutting tools so even on our aluminum oxides like that one you have in your hand is a brown AO so when we start coding for for products like filmtech and echostorm we're using aluminum oxides that all this stuff's made in the lab nothing's mined anymore so we have them manufactured for us where they're they're more brittle and more friable so if we're going to use an 80 grit we want a brown aluminum oxide because we just want to cut something down we're not worried about the Finish when we start getting our finished grits which we consider 150 and above we start using pink and white aluminum oxides and they act a more a lot more like a silica carbide silicon carbide by by nature is extremely hard but it's extremely brittle and you want that because if you're sanding a seal coat you don't want to sand through so you want that cutting tool to crack really easily and we've done that with aluminum oxide that's where econ which is our brand of paper which you know you need is the owner of echamat that's where they really have excelled because we focus on wood in fact a lot of our Metal Products to be honest with you we actually Source some of that material from other sources because our stuff's really not not made for metal so just um to get back to you know the cloth um film Tech echostorm echostorm's paper on film Tech and um these are your guys's names for your products um it's for me it's easy to identify film Tech because it's blue at the storm because it's yellow um this is the cloth you know how how does like our viewers anybody wanted to know how do I know if this is cloth or not if I bought it from a different manufacturer if I went to a a hardware store how do I know whether I'm purchasing um film paper or cloth is It's probably hard to tell um unless it gives you that information on the package now cloth you'll always know because it's always going to be kind of this brown color and it's usually not steroided whereas these products are and what a steration means like this is really easy to see because it's still a carbide you see that white creamy look to it that goes back to again to try to reduce the heat that's actually almost like the easiest way to describe it's almost like putting a layer of soap on it so so it does two things it makes the product run cooler and it also helps the fibers or anything you're sanding to slide out from in between the grains now these are different this one is a top-sided uh steration just like that one so that's a after we make the product we come back with a final application and put that on the top the thing I love about film Tech I always go back to this because the steration is even better on this because it's done on the resins so you're getting that nice coolant added to it but that'll come off the top a lot easier whereas this stays in the product all the way through the use of the grain as far as knowing the difference if I if you had no other way to do it just take it and do this that's go to tear and this one you'll know you've got paper instead of film yeah because I know I yeah that's one way I do it and um you can take and tear the paper pretty easily in the film it's very difficult to tear I mean if you really you know torque on it and you're strong enough you can tear it um it's interesting the cloth so is the cloth not terrible cloth is very do you can tear it was very difficult to tear okay and as far as like that's a very flexible cloth is what you want to use on wood in case you got any profiles yeah because this this feels like it actually just feels like cloth so to me it feels so different than the paper and one way that's a good point so cloth is very typically for what you're doing in wood is very flexible right paper has got a little bit of flex to it for sure but you can definitely feel this how how stiff it is in a way but still has some you know has the ability to fold because or to bend and get Contours because it just won't crack or anything and I know like when I first started messing around with abrasives and you know this is gonna um you know sound like it's you know pretty Elementary but you know but I started hearing the term um loading and um I had no idea what what loading was and you you brought it up and heat is you know um you know an important factor and successful sanding and keeping the heat down and not loading your braces so what the heck is loading anyways loading is simply just what it sounds like and people may not realize they saw it when they did um it's when the the fibers or if you're sanding a finish it ends up getting caught in between the coats in between the grains yeah so you've got a little bit of space between the grains the finer you go the closer you bring those grains together to get a better finish um but if they load up what's going to happen is eventually it's going to quit cutting because now the loading is higher than the grain so you're not not getting that cut and and then it just starts to burn starts to heat up yeah yeah because what I what I notice um like if I'm using film Tech and I'm sanding in between coats of like a 2K poly if I'm putting too much pressure not just letting the sander do the work and keeping it cool you'll start to get that 2K poly whether that's white or whatever it starts to build up you know in abrasive and as soon as it starts to do that your abrasives no longer effective and you just gotta um you know rip it off and just use another one so I'm keeping your abrasive cool letting your sand to do the work you're less likely to load your abrasives absolutely and loading's a big issue for for refinishing um you know so a lot of times we see people that tend to go to sand that second coat a little too soon and that's when at least having some type of sometimes if if it's not quite cured enough it's going to load no matter what but uh that does help having the the uh steriations and even if you got something that's not quite cured a lot of times that top side of sterilation is better right because it's going to kind of perform a little bit better and not load as quickly I always find the film Tech will tend to load a little quicker than what this product would but the longevity of film Tech and the and the ability of it not to tear I think is what really makes it the the best choice so I think that that's um kind of a good point that you brought up if you're really trying to push the limits of you know um recoding you know and trying to do that faster than what you should be doing before the the coating is actually cured maybe echostorm might be a better option if you're trying to push those limits I think echostorm is a good option um because of that top side is duration you know it's one of those things with sandpaper you kind of have to trial and error see what works better for you but you know I think the key was sanding first of all all you want to really reduce the pressure even if you're sanding by hand try not to to lay into it you know if it's a machine let the machine do the work and then secondly what you brought up it's important to pick the right abrasive right if you're doing a lot of flat sanding papers fine it does a good job but if you haven't hit a lot of edges that's when I would go to the film because it's going to hold up better on the durability on the edges yeah I know um you know I I very rarely ever go to paper but I'm using filmtech a lot and then you have some foam abrasives and we'll talk about the foamer races here in just a minute but those are like game changing abrasives in my mind so we'll get into that in a little more detail here on another video [Music] thank you