I’m a sandin’ fool.
I spent almost two hours out on the deck yesterday sanding one door.
Normally, I’ve been able to sand an entire door, both sides, in an hour. I’ve had really good luck with 400 grit paper on my random-orbital sander. It does a great job, and for minor mill marks it makes quick work of cleaning up a side of a door. I use about one pad per door side, which isn’t too bad when you consider how big some of these doors are.
The back-side of the 24″ closet door I started working on yesterday had more than your normal milling marks. It looked like this one was passed under an 80 grit belt sander and shipped off. Talk about atrocious. I went through three 400 grit pads on the back-side of the door, and -still- haven’t gotten -all- of them to disappear. I’m close, but not quite. Eventually, I got fed up, flipped it over and did half of the front of the door in about fifteen minutes. Much better. I have about half the front left to do tonight, then I’ll re-visit the back once more. This door should be ready to finish in another hour or so of sanding.
This has led me to pick up a pack of 220 grit pads for the R-O sander today. It seems that the other 24″ doors are just as bad on the back sides, and I’m -not- going to spend two hours on a door.
My plan is to finish two 24″ doors at the same time. The spraying rack was built to hold them like this, and I plan to use that feature.
The big 32″ door still isn’t hung yet. I realized yesterday that I forgot a minor adjustment to the jamb. The brushed-nickel hinges I have are square-cornered, but the brass ones that came with the doors from the factory were rounded. I’ve got a corner chisel I picked up on sale (cheap!) that makes it way too easy to square the corners on the hinge mortises. I remembered to square the door slab mortises, but forgot to square the jamb mortises. I’ll square, stain, and put a thin coat of poly on those tonight.