+ Restoration Tricks and Tips

 Some useful tools and workspace prep tips…

"Use those cans of pressurized "air" that are normally used for cleaning computers and keyboards as a way to blow all of the sanded down particulates out of nooks and crannies in your spackling job or off of your deck or work surface or whatever. People look at you funny when you buy a bunch of cans of that stuff all at once like you're some sort of inhalant hype, but there's nothing prohibiting you from buying as much of that as you want at a time"

"To prevent dings and dents in the board you're working on, duct tape a layer or two of paper towel around the edges and borders of your work bench. I also have duct taped a big patch of paper towel flat in the center of my work surface, just so I can set the deck down without having to worry about scuffing it or anything. When it gets dusty or messy, you can just pull it up and put down a new layer of padding. My personal preference for brand of paper towel to have handy in the resto lab is Kleenex brand paper towels. They're much sturdier than average, very absorbant for dabbing at misapplied paint, and don't tend to disintegrate into lots of little fibers that will get into your paint and shit and mess everything up. They have a strength and consistancy similar to Box O' Rags shop towels. (When I'm a gazillionaire I'm going to use Box O' Rags towels instead of paper towels in my kitchen, but right now they're just too damned expensive for a majority of kitchen uses...) "

"ANGLED foam sanding blocks. A true godsend. I have a bunch (8?) of them in both fine and medium grains. I'd recommend having more foam sanding blocks than you think you'll need, because they'll fill up with whatever you're sanding (paint, spackling compound especially) and lose their grittyness until you wash them, and you really can't do any more work with them until they've dried out. They're great for when you're rebuilding a worn down tail and you want the spackled/rebuilt area to be flush with the plane of the wood. They don't curve like a regular rectangular block has a slight tendency to do, so you can get a perfectly unnoticeable seam between wood and spackle. I took one of them and cut it in half (perpendicular to the angled side), and then cut one of the halves into quarters. These smaller angled pieces are good for working on sanding smaller areas without disturbing everything else within a 3" radius like a normal rectangular block might. "