Hi, how are you ?
Floor Bore here again.
Today we are in the realm of smoothness...!

In the last chapter we navigated through the gateway to smoothness .
The floors are now level and to the naked eye,
pretty smooth with all the marks from our belt machine removed.
We are left with 60 grit rotary machine scratches on the main floor,
and 40 grit scratches on the edges.
How we finish the floors now is largely dependent on the wood type,
and the finish required.

So let's take our Victorian Pine floor which we will finish with a water based lacquer.
Lacquers sit on top of the wood, so we do not need to sand the floors to a very fine abrasive, but we still need to take the floors a stage further to avoid showing sanding marks and to close the grain .
Firstly we will edge the floors with 80 grit abrasives, taking care and using our lights to make sure the sanding is smooth and removes any remaining 40 grit marks from the previous pass.
We now sand the main floor with 80 grit abrasives on our rotary sander to remove the previous sixty grit scratches.
When we start fine sanding with our finishing machine our use of lights changes somewhat.
Initially we use the light to check how many passes it takes to remove the previous scratch marks.
It's better to over compensate here so that we know for certain that the previous scratches WILL be removed .
Once we have decided on the amount of passes we put our light aside and confidently sand the whole floor.
The reason to abandon the light here is that it is difficult and time consuming to keep checking the floor as the difference in scratch marks will be quite small .
We finish the process by sanding/scraping the corners (more about this in another chapter).
Our floor is now be ready to be vacuumed and prepared for the application of Primer/ lacquer.
As mentioned in previous chapters,
the combination of the machine and abrasive used will effect your sanding process quite radically so you need to find the appropriate schedule to fit your machines and abrasives used.
The main point here is to work methodically and check that all previous scratches are being removed by your next grade of abrasive.
Preparing a pine floor for lacquer application requires the least amount of sanding compared to other woods and finishes.
Staining, oiling, colour oiling and sanding harder or more exotic woods will require that you journey further into the REALM OF SMOOTHNESS!

The Art of Floor Sanding (part 6). In the realm of smoothness!