G'day Spreyton(s),

For what it's worth, a couple of tips re. your orbital sander :

- On the topic of clogged discs, try hooking up vacuum extraction to your sander. Usually you can do this by cobbling some kind of fitting up to the port where the dust bag goes. If you don't have a dust extractor, one of the Triton dust buckets paired with a cheapo secondhand vacuum cleaner will work quite well. You'll be very pleasantly surprised about how much additional life you can get out of the discs with extraction in place (which justifies the expense of extraction).

- On the topic of swirly marks (aka swirlies), if your orbital has variable speed try playing around with the speed, probably upwards compared to what it's set at now. Swirlies are a fact of life with orbitals, but you can minimise them with appropriate disc speed and hand pressure for the type of timber you're sanding. Vacuum extraction will also help, as you won't have crap stuck to the discs which will leave scratches in the surface.

If you're looking to do a bit of sanding in the future, and your orbital doesn't have the ability to hook up extraction, or variable speed, then I'd be thinking about getting another one if I were you.


Cheers,


Justin.