I used one of these sanders to remove heavy textured paint from the plaster walls of my 1890's Victorian in Maryland. This involved sanding every inch of a 3000 square foot house with heavy grit (60 grit) paper over a three month period. I estimate that I ran this unit for over 30 hours a week for the entire three months without a break. I still have it and it works fine.
The unit has a couple of problems that I noted over time:
1. The dust collector is cloth over a steel spring that tears where the cloth meets the hard plastic base of the dust collection bag.
2. The pad that accepts the hook-and-loop paper sometimes tears when removing the paper. This is easily replaced, but isn't cheap to do.
3. While the dust collector works pretty well (until it tears, that is), it is small and you have to stop work often to empty it. This is not a problem with the small jobs I use it on now, but it was annoying when I was sanding the walls.
4. Paper is costly and you will have to be careful of which brand you buy. There are some sanders with just 4 dust collection holes, while this one has I think 8, so you need to buy the paper that is right for the sander. They do sell it in 25 sheet packs, which cuts down on the cost. We used about 10 such packs, each costing about $10 to $15 at the big box store near us.
One final bit of advise: Always wear a resperator or face mask when sanding paint. Safety glasses are a must too. DEWALT D26451K 3 Amp 5-Inch Random Orbit Sander with Cloth Dust Bag
before this unit, I had an off-brand $30 4" square pad sander that I used to polish the intake manifold on my car. It burned out after probably less than 40 hours of use.
I bought this sander as a replacement when I bought a house and decided to refinish the wood floors. I rented a drum sander to remove the bulk of the old finish, but I had to trace around the edge of all the rooms to remove the material. I bought this sander for $69 at Lowes and about 20 sheets of 40 grit paper, and this little sucker hummed away for hours and knocked out all the excess finish.
After about a week of walking over the exposed wood, painting walls, and moving scaffolding, I had to do a once-over on the wood to clean it up. I hit the whole floor (about 500 sq. ft.) with 60 grit, then did it again with 100 grit. This little sander cleaned it up beautifully, and I was surprised that it ran under heavy cyclic loading for about 5 hours without a hiccup. My knees didn't do as well.
I'm glad I bought it and expect that it will withstand many more hours of continued abuse.
Edit 7/15/2011: So I've owned this sander since October of 2006, and I'm happy to say that it has had years of heavy use now. I just refinished my kitchen floor with it! I used a vacuum adapter to connect it to my shop vac as I was reluctant to pull a drum sander into the small space. Kitchen is about 150 ft^2, it did wonderfully well, and I minimized the dust with the shop vac attachment. Very happy with this sander.
I love this sander. Next to my Bosch "Sawz-all" this is my favorite power tool. I have used it on prejects that range from sanding the body work on my race bike to sanding the plaster walls in our 1903 Craftsman house to sanding woodworking projects. This sander is built to last and can be used as hard as you want. The only comments I do have is 1) you need to be careful when remmoving the sandpaper from the hook and loop disc, it is best to pull the sandpaper off in a direction that is parallel to the surface of the pad, basically pulling the sandpaper back over itself. If you pull it off perpendicular to the surface of the pad, the hook and loop pad tends to pull apart. 2) The hook and loop pad tends to get chewed up if you are not careful about replacing worn sandpaper. But that said, after almost three years of hard use mine is still on it's first hook and loop pad and is now more like a 4.5inch sander than a 5inch sander.....time to replace it.
Yeah, this is the definately sander to own (or equivalently the PC brand, which is also good).
Aside from the effectiveness of the machine itself as a sander, I truly appreciate the instant ease of changing the sanding discs. Too many times I've changed from 60 grit to 100 grit to 180 grit and then need to go back to the 100 or 60 again. Presto chango! Just remove the current disc and use the old 100 disc again.
This sander is not wasteful like the quarter sheet sanders, where you only get one use from the paper, these sanding discs can be used and reused many, many times and always stay tight on the sander. The discs do not tear or crease when you remove them, there's no sticky mess or clamping gymnastics, the hook and loop attach lets you change and rechange discs instantly with ease-ease-ease. This aspect alone has revised my entire philosophy of machine sanding.
And those discs do last forever. So maybe they cost a bit more up front but you can save them and get every bit of use out of them by reusing and reusing and reusing them until they are totally depleted. Definately worth the extra cost which can also be moderated by buying in bulk from a discount supplier. I keep my used discs in a 5 1/4 floppy disk strorage box, fits perfectly and prevents curling.
One criticism of the unit though, the "rubber" base pad does not last forever, mine just plain disintergrated after about four years and I had to replace it for about $20. But even though I grumbled about that I'm still very keen on this sander.
Also, I have the older model with the plastic dust collector which I think was better than the cloth bag.
In short, its the best, and most cost effective, sanding investment I ever made and I should have bought one of these years before.
I had the opportunity to use one of these sanders on a recent remodel job. I was surprised at how well the dustless bag actually collected sanded material. The random orbit works well on any grain pattern and the hookless sandpaper is very easy to use and convenient.
When I saw the price for one on Amazon, I was blown away. I ordered it immediately. It won't replace the need for a heavy-duty belt sander, but for finishing work this is one fine piece of equipment. I'll be using it a lot when I refinish our wood floors this summer. - Random-orbit Sanders - Sander - Dewalt - Tools'
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