Buffer Sanding Wood Floors with Lenny Hall NWFA and City Floor Supply

All these machines between the buffers and the multihead sanders have a

different center of mass balance point. That's really where you want to focus

your sanding on. In this case we're just discussing a standard motor on a stick,

plain buffer, no added features, the cut place is actually down here just to the

right side of the handle.

If you put a hard plate on the machine under a bunch of pads like this, you know, you

can soften how much compression your paper has and it spreads the pressure

around the paper so you can get less less hard cut if you wanted to. So you

can use this or that to soften and move the pressure point around. But you'll

dish out if you spend a lot of time on it, yeah. It would still dish out

because it compresses.Thank you. See, this paper here,

even if this paper here is so flexible that if I were to put that over

the floor and I have a lot of wide open grain that where it's pushing the

sandpaper into the grain, it's gonna scoop it out if you spend a lot of

time on it. So that's why you spend a lot of time on a hard plate or a stiff

multi-head and really get the floor dead flat and then the rest of is just like,

just kicking, just burnishing scratches off. You're not trying to sit

there and try to dig out a drum dig or an edger mark. Yeah, I would go

from this with that or I would use a multi head and go from steel to the

interface pad and just make it softer because what this does is if I take

my finger and press right here as opposed to a piece of sandpaper directly

on the floor with my finger on it all my pressure is in that one spot, right.

But if I do it with this guy here, it's spread out. Okay, so it's a matter of do

you have focused pressure which would be the hard plate right here, or do you have

spread out pressure, which could be an upright PowerDrive finer paper, interface

pad, a lot of things you can manipulate. This is where it becomes an art. It's not

a set formula for every job and you shouldn't treat every job exactly the

same in every way. So you see this is the highest pressure point right here okay.

So every machine has a certain design of how it sands. Learn your machine and on

what paper and what configuration of pads you have underneath it and use that

to your advantage. Put this so the machine is in the direction of the wood

grain, okay. So as I said earlier and I'm gonna

refer back to this machine here, if I have a driving pad on the machine and

let's say I have this configuration here, I'm gonna have the same pressure point

but over a broader area and I need to make sure that all that is in the

direction of the wood grain. It won't be as aggressive because you saw what I do

with my finger here to here. That's the same thing. Yeah this guy. You can

alter the style pad. This will not distribute the weight as much if this is

my room, just one room scenario, this would be the same if it's a multi room

house like that thing over, is that I would pick the upper right corner. This

is what I'm calling the upper right corner relative to the direction of the wood

floor. It could have been that corner or it could have been that corner. There's

the upper right corner. So what I would want to do is I would want to start here.

Now based on what you saw, every machine's footprint is gonna be a little

different but almost every machine spinning counterclockwise has from

center to the right and back from center, that's the high pressure point. So I want

to rub my handle and my shoulder against the wall as much as possible to do it

this way because if I'm standing this way trying to buff against that wall

line, the nose of this machine is not doing the hard work. It's back here. And

that's where a lot of guys don't think about that because they're thinking I

got all 16 inches of paper on the floor and all 16 inches are working, but they

work differently. So I would run my machine this way, I would picture frame

the room completely until I get back to this corner. Once I'm at this corner my

next action is to--I don't want to clog the paper by sanding this thing off

of it--because I would want to slowly rotate the machine till I'm motor in

front of the stick which would be nose against the wall running that way. So I'm

on the right-hand side of the room moving right to left.

When I get to that corner--I'm gonna wheel myself over there--

No because it's just gonna clog up with this stuff. I'll do it, I'll do

it again. So once I'm

over here into my corner with the motor in front of a stick, motor still spinning,

I slowly rotate the machine while keeping in the same spot and then I go

back and cover the same path I went. What I've done is I've taken my cut point

from going cross-grain here, rotating it out into a straight line cut

with the grain, but all the rest of that paper is polishing out. Now the first

couple pass doesn't get as clean as the rest of the floor because the polishing

pad here, the polishing part has only touched once here, twice here, three times

there, four times there, but this is where the scratches are, so it's cutting four

times on that one spot with the lighter and lighter lighter pressure side of the

disc. So as I go back and forth I'm crossing back my path to the left

from left to the right, then I drop down here to two to three inches. Go back over

the same path, repeat the same path back this way, drop down on this side two to

three inches and repeat back and forth. It's a machine and it wobbles and it

wiggles but the idea is to do that as best as possible and what happens is

you've you covered your sandpaper on a single spot of the floor five to six

times with lighter and lighter and lighter pressure. And eventually you

polish out all your scratches and now, like I said slow, and methodical with a

hard plate but once you're on a final polish pad or polish pad with, you know,

220 grit paper on it stuck on or while you're polishing with, you're moving

doing the same thing but you're moving much more briskly over the floor two to

three times faster. It's just to slick it. You're just trying to slick it.