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My Bosh GEX 125-1 AE Random Orbital Sander tends to round all my edges. I am sanding a table top and all points are now curved down, instead of straight.

I believe this is happening because the sander's pad is somewhat concave, probably to better suck out the dust, and when I pass it over an edge, the edge gets into the concave and gets its form, thus, being rounded.

I am somewhat new to woodworking, so I would like to know how the experienced guys deal with this, do you avoid sanding edges with a Random Orbital Sander at all and only sand it by hand? Or is it there some sort of trick?

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    Soft pad on the sander versus a firm one will absolutely do this, in fact it's nearly impossible to stop some softening of arrises and rounding of corners with an ROS fitted with a foam pad. You can exclusively sand by hand near all edges but that quite frankly is a PITA at the best of times (and more importantly it's hard to get a uniform sanded surface this way). This is one of many reasons I think scraping is better than sanding :-)
    – Graphus
    Commented Jun 18, 2018 at 12:25
  • I am currently sanding by hand, I will take a look, thanks!
    – mFeinstein
    Commented Jun 18, 2018 at 12:53

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One option would be to clamp or otherwise secure sacrificial wood to the table edges, extending the portion that would be rounded off to be outside of your desired surface. The added wood should have the top surface level with the table surface.

The sanding pad will follow the new surface, which would not require that you approach the edge, or if you did, the rounding would be on scrap wood.

This method works best on rectangular surfaces or those with straight edges, for obvious reasons.

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  • Good idea! Unfortunately I don't know if it's practical on my case, but I will definitely keep it in mind
    – mFeinstein
    Commented Jun 18, 2018 at 12:54

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