Cleaning freshly stabilized blocks

quint

quint

Joined
Nov 29, 2011
Messages
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So I send all my wood to knife and gun to get stabilized. Always comes back looking great as long as I do my end properly. Only issue I have is initial clean up of the blocks. They go thru belts pretty quickly because the resin stuff gums up the belt. There usually always seems to be alot of extra resin stuff to clean off.

Was wondering if you guys had any pointers for cleaning up the blocks. Just wanna make sure I am not missing something totally obvious.
 
Been using 60grit. Ill try a courser grit. Probably helps when cleaning the belt to have a courser grit. Thanks.
 
There are some abrasives that should be suitable but I don't know if they are available for belts. On these the abrasive covers various percentages of backing .For example a coverage of 80% or 60% coverage would gumb up a lot less.
 
Thanks for the suggestions guys. Will try the lower grit and make sure I use my belt cleaners more often. That may be a big part of it. I probably dont clean it enough and then let it get hot which causes the material to gunk up on the belt.
 
I haven't had to clean any up myself in a while, but I always used a 36X AO belt with an 8" or 10" contact wheel to knock the crud off the outside of the blocks. Add in one of those "giant eraser" sticks to clean the belt, and you can get a lot of blocks done in a hurry. :)

With stuff like this it's usually our gut instinct to think, "I want this flat/square/rectangular material to be flat, so I'll use the flat platen." But then you're trying to take the whole surface down all at once. If you go with the small surface area contact you get with a contact wheel, it makes things go so much faster. And if you're careful you can get things fairly flat... shoot, just think of a surface grinder. ;) :)
 
Before switching stabilizing services I was getting back "dirty," blocks and started buying 24 grit belts for my 4x36 sander and they did a phenomenal job at cleaning up. After, the blocks go to a disc sander with a 80 grit (garnet because it polishes as it cuts and seems to stay sharper longer) disc. The process only took a few minutes and left them ready to be used as is, resawn or turned (pre sanding cut down on dull tools due to the hard resin chunks).
 
I use cheap belts on my 4x36. Like Nick says, using the wheel instead of the platen really speeds the process up. Mind you, I'm not shy about burning through the belts on the 4x36, since I buy them in 3-packs at HF.
 
I use 36 grit AO on a 6X48. It is fast and leaves a suprisingly good surface. If wanted, I change to a 120 grit belt to show the surface features better.
 
Thanks guys. All good stuff to implement.

A 6x48 is on the list of things to get so as soon as one pops up on CL I am gonna try to snag it up. Just have the NWG I built and a 12" disk that I picked up from grizzly. Ill do the contact wheel method until I can get the 6x48.

Thanks again.
 
I used a 6x48 with 120 belts. I messed up a few blocks by letting them get to hot when cleaning them up. If I let them get to hot the block would get a white milky blob/patch.
It would have probably been better with a 36 belt. The rubber eraser cleaning stick worked great for extending belts.
 
Quint,
Nobody else really mentioned it -- and I don't know what equipment you have available -- but a face-mill will clean up a block fairly quickly. I just make sure to have my vacuum handy to suck up the dust as it's produced. Then quickly touch-up the blocks on a 9" disc.
Erin
 
I can't even imagine how long it would take to face mill six sides per block for a few hundred blocks. The set-up time alone would be a lot. It takes less than a minute per block by hand on a 6X48.
 
bladsmth said:
I can't even imagine how long it would take to face mill six sides per block for a few hundred blocks. The set-up time alone would be a lot. It takes less than a minute per block by hand on a 6X48.
Click to expand...

Hmmm... all I have is a 2x72... but after clogging up a ton of 36-grit belts (at usually $5 a pop) on an order from WSSI, the 2" face mill is pretty damn fast. Maybe 15 seconds for a pass... 30s-40s to flip the block and do the next side. I'm fairly sure that it takes me less than 5min per block for the milling. It's by far the best method of cleanup that I've come across with my limited machinery. And way less fine dust everywhere.

I do usually end up touching the blocks to a 120-grit disc before I'm done... so they're nice an pretty for storage. But this is super quick once all the hard-bubbly surface crud is removed by the face-mill.

Just my $0.02...
Erin
 
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