Wednesday, January 1, 2014

An interesting new product

Like many of you, I strongly dislike sandpaper.  Sanding is dusty, tedious work that I try to avoid with planes and scrapers.  However, a new product from Lee Valley is intriguing:
It's definitely not sophisticated, just a triangular piece of extruded aluminum with a T track to accommodate a knob.  The face is machined and has a small lip to keep the shooting board from being worn away by the PSA sandpaper.

The shooting board is the same one that fits their shooting plane.  I'd rather own the shooting plane, but it costs an order of magnitude more, $335 vs. $30.  I can't justify the plane but I think this shooting sander would be really handy for occasional use.  You could make something similar, but the price is definitely right.

I do have a shooting board that I use with a bench plane but I find it extremely awkward to grasp the plane and difficult to keep the plane flat to the track.  I have intended to make an accessory "hot dog" like this by Derek Cohen:
I'm not sure that it would be that much of an improvement, but it's hard to tell without trying it.  What's your solution?

1 comment:

  1. Give the hotdog a try. Dereks version very pretty, but really it's just a handle that needs to be comfortable. I've made a couple out of scraps from 2x4 and such. A little chisel work to make the groove, and a rasp to form it. It will change your opinion of shooting.

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