RM Online - What you need to know about sanders

Since the Renaissance of hardwood floors in the 1980s, more and more homeowners are rediscovering beautiful wooden floors hidden for years under carpet and deciding to restore them to enjoy their natural beauty. During the last two decades, floor-sanding equipment, along with the sale of all associated products including varnishes, abrasives and applicators, has become an important part of business for many rental stores. Each year, more and more stores are lured by the demand for sanders and decide to include them in their inventory offering.

These new trends in the floor-covering industry have undeniably influenced manufacturers of floor-sanding equipment. The growing demand for a product, consequently, leads to stronger competition, which in turn forces manufacturers to modernize existing products and launch new, technologically advanced products.

The same happened to the floor-sanding machines. The biggest improvement can be seen in sanders' performance, both in the quality and precision of sanding, and effectiveness of dust collection.

A rental store operator who wants to offer both his contractor and homeowner customers a full line of floor-sanding and finishing machines should start with three: a drum sander, a disc sander called an edger and an orbital finishing sander, which has become a standard piece of equipment in most stores.

There are four important features a rental store operator should have in mind when investing in floor-sanding equipment. These four features - durability, performance, effectiveness of dust collection and low maintenance - will have a decisive impact on the profitability of the investment. Therefore, gathering sufficient information before deciding to purchase a particular brand is important.

Durability is very important in the rental market be-cause rental operators do not deal with a single, long-term owner, but rather with thousands of short-term users. The customer's goal is usually to finish a particular job in the shortest amount of time, which often leads to the abuse of the equipment. The solid construction and quality of the equipment is crucial.

The performance of a drum sander will be apparent in the quality of the finish. This final effect will depend mainly on the system used to control the sander's drum operation and on the type of drum. There are two systems of controlling the drum operation currently on the market. The older one requires an operator to tilt the whole machine in order to make contact between the drum and the floor and start the sanding process. The other system controls the position of the drum during sanding using the drum-lowering lever (so-called fingertip controls).

Drum floor sanders have a spring-loaded, bar clamp or expandable drum.

The purchase of the disc floor sander or edger should depend on the part of the country where you are located. For the regions where radiators are common, an edger with a prolonged nose is strongly recommended. This type of edger makes it possible to sand all hard-to-reach areas (under radiators, kitchen cabinets and stairs) and eliminates the use of an under-radiator edger, which is not equipped with any dust-pickup system.

The orbital floor-finishing sander has become a standard sander in many rental stores and is gradually replacing buffer machines in the process of refinishing hardwood floors. The most important thing to remember about orbital floor sanders is that they are not designed to replace drum sanders, but are to be used on the jobs where drum sanders would be too aggressive - parquet and prefinished floors, removal of several coats of finish or paint, renewing the floor with the application of two or three coats of new varnish, and sanding between coats of finish.

The growing popularity of the orbital sander has been strongly influenced by the way the machine works: it oscillates on the surface, removes coats of varnish and does not cut into the wood as a drum sander does. It is impossible to damage the floor with this sander - even if it remains on the same spot for a long time. There are orbital floor sanders with an efficient dust-collection system available on the market. When gathering information about this type of sander you should have in mind one additional and very important feature - the pressure of a sanding plate on the floor by square inch (PSI). The more pressure, the more aggressive and effective an or-bital floor sander will be.

And finally, be sure that manufacturers understand how important your new investment in floor-sanding equipment is to you. They will be able to answer all of your possible questions and send you detailed information on the specific equipment you are interested in.