Big Brother Sander

I wrote last week how I got a Festool 3-1/2" (90mm) sander. Just yesterday I finished up the pickets of my fence.I liked it enough that I was motivated to buy its bigger brother, the 6" (150mm) sander to do my back deck. While it's not in as bad a shape as the fence up front, it still is needing a bit of TLC.Yes, it may seem excessive to have not one, but two awesome sanders, but I'll get to that in a moment.Today after work (I was working from home to get my delivery of tools... but this is just a teaser) I started doing the sides of the pickets with the delta attachment to my RO-90 sander. It was doing a fine job.After working at it for a bit I decided to take a look at the 6" sander. I was wondering if the sanding pad had enough stickout to handlethe 1/2" pickets. It did!And the 24-grit sanding disc (!!! WTF?! 24 grit?!) running in geared orbital mode was doing in around 5 seconds what the smaller one took a minute. (But note that the 6" would be too wide to comfortably do the faces of the pickets)Then I decided to try it out on one of the 4x4" fenceposts.The RO-90 was taking around 10 minutes to do a face of the posts. Partly because the paint was generally sticking to the posts as opposed to the pickets to it was sure abrasive action to get these cleaned.Instead of 10 minutes... think two minutes a side.Damn.With the 24-grit paper, it's almost a sanding angle-grinder. Sure, I'll likely go over it again with 80-grit to make it a bit nicer... but that'll take 30-seconds a face.I'm rather happy with my splurge!

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Fence: Sanded!

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Picket sanding: DONE!