"The best tools on the job still are your hands and eyes."
Log in to view the full article
"The best tools on the job still are your hands and eyes."
Those are words that my friend Daniel Boone drove home on every job we worked on. No matter what tool you are using, it never will do the task without your hands working it and your eyes watching it. Think about that as you run the tools.
On this job I have been working the edger over the factory-finish floor:
I needed to use the aluminum oxide mineral to get the factory finish off. For this job we used the 3M paper, why, you may ask? Well, it has a paper-back bolt-on, not hook and loop. My goal is to get the finish off, and as we know the factory finish is some tough stuff. I took 100-grit and 80-grit to get it off and flat. My next cut was with 80-grit hook-and-loop black mineral to remove any deep scratch left from the aluminum oxide.
The best way I can explain it is that I went backwards to go forward: getting the finish off and then making sure it was flat was the goal at first. After that, my task was to get the floor ready for stain. So, the 80-grit black hook-and-loop Virginia Abrasive is the next paper I used. I like the hook-and-loop paper on the flex pad on my Super 7 R edger.
Sounds like a NASCAR ad with all the brands that I have tossed out here, but it so true that you need to find the best mineral for your style of sanding. I use two brands of papers and find that those two will do everything we need on the jobs. I have not used a screen in years thanks to the 16-inch paper on a soft plate. We have talked about soft plates a few times, and when done right, you will not leave a mark in the floor. So when you stain a floor you will not see buffer marks; this allows the stain to keep the rich tones. If you over-buff, the floor will close and not give the true color of the stain. Also if you over-buff you can "dish out" the floor, making it look bad.
Knowing we are going to stain the floor, I got out the old-school tools and hand-scraped the wall lines so we had no edger marks to pop out when we stained the floor. I took a bright light and ran the wall lines with the scraper, then went behind that with a sanding block. It was faster than you might think. The real key is getting the blade right on the scraper-then just rock and roll. The blend all comes together with the buffer and the soft plate. Here it is:
This was just under 1,000 feet of flooring; I got it all done with stain/seal and two coats in four days. I would have been done sooner but the master bedroom had a perfect halo around the walls; I was sure that I over-buffed the walls and made the halo. So I got the big machine out again and re-sanded the room again, edged the walls, hand-scraped and sanded with the hand block. Got the buffer out to blend the marks and stained it all over... and it was still there! Then it hit me-the area rug was the same exact size. How dumb can you be? I did all that work to fix my mistake and it was really the color change on the floor from the rug. The dark and light from the sun just had me off my game; it was sad but I feel good that I did my best to remove it.
Well that is one for the OJT (On the Job Training) lesson ... How dumb can you feel?
On a better note: Great news, the CARDINALS win the World Series!!!!!