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PSA: Old timer in Waco told me to stop sanding plywood edges with 220 and it saved my last 3 cabinet jobs
Dropped by a small cabinet shop in Waco last month to pick up a used router table I found online. The owner, guy named Ray, must have been pushing 70. He watched me load the table and asked what I was building. I said face frame cabinets for a kitchen remodel and mentioned I was fighting with plywood edges that kept fuzzing up on me. He laughed and said stop using 220 on the edges, you are just polishing the fuzz. He grabbed a scrap of birch ply from his rack, hit the edge with 120 on a block, then 150, then said put a little glue size on it before you sand the second pass. That one tip changed how my edges come out, no more tear out, no more fuzzy patches showing through paint. I did his method on 6 doors last week and they came out slick as glass. Anybody else ever get a free lesson from some old guy that turns out to be worth more than the tool you drove there to buy?
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beth_butler7523h ago
Read somewhere that old school trim carpenters did the glue size trick on MDF edges too, something about the glue stiffening up the fibers so they cut clean instead of mushing. Sounds like Ray and those guys figured out the same thing decades ago while the rest of us were out buying fancy sanding blocks.
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