Floor sander capability?

[ian maybury]

Hi guys. I've just hired a floor sander to do a bedroom - the floor is T&G softwood from the 1950s that's been stained, but has only light marking (was under a carpet) and is dry as a bone.

The hire people issued all sorts of dire warnings about needing to handle it carefully at risk of gouging the floor, and swore blind that the professional floor refinishing guys hire them - but this thing wouldn't drag itself out of bed. It's taking of the order of 8 - 10 passes to get down to bare wood using 40grit paper.

It's a drum type, what looks like an earlier (?) single speed version of this one http://www.hiretech.biz/products/ht8_features.html The drum is about 10in wide by about 6in in diameter, and it's plated at our 230V single phase/8A which equates to about 1.8Kw.

Which seems pretty miserable for a machine swinging such a large drum to me. It bogs and would stall if the weight of the machine was allowed to rest on the drum in use - not only is it necessary to control the forward speed, it's also necessary to keep some backwards pressure on the handle to offload the drum.

It's only possible out is that the brushes are visible and are obviously sparking heavily.

Can anybody advise what the skinny on floor sanding is? Should this machine be removing material much faster, or is it some sort of DIY grade mouse power special made for hire shops?

What do the professionals use? Am I doing something daft?

Thanks in advance,

ian

[Bill White]

Most of those beasts will eat thru to the foundation if you're not careful. Something's not right with your machine.
Bill

[Stephen Cherry]

Most of those beasts will eat thru to the foundation if you're not careful. Something's not right with your machine.
Bill


yup. These machines should be very agressive.

[ian maybury]

Thanks for the inputs guys. It seems now that barring it's stopping on a temperature switch that there was something wrong with it - it developed what felt like a misfire (switching off for an instant every now and then), and has now quit completely.

That said I'm kind of dubious regarding the ability of this thing at 1.8kW to be all that aggressive.

It's going back in the morning, and I'll paint the floor...


ian

[fred klotz]

I think the properly running machine will do the job. Remember, that 6" drum has a pretty small contact area, which is why they can gouge quickly. My experiences with that type of machine was more of keeping it moving and not gouging, as opposed to babying it along.

[ian maybury]

Thanks Fred, it starts to sound like maybe I'm being a little too cynical. That said I found a video on U tube of a belt type sander on wheels in action, and in that case a single pass was doing the business - leaving a nice clean strip width of the drum. How much it took off was largely dependent on a setting that determined the drum height relative to the wheels. The unit I had would need to take on heck of a step up if it was to do that.

We'll see what happens when I bring it back in the morning..

ian