Transcript:
0:12
This is Paul Nelson with Western Sport Floors, coming to you from Montana. Today I’m in a middle school in a little town in the middle of Montana. Just wanted to take a look before we start sanding this floor at what we’re up against.

0:36
This floor has obviously been around a while.

0:40
It’s an older facility, but interestingly they took the bleachers out, we’re going to sand under where the old bleachers were.

0:47
And then subsequent to that they’ll put in a new set of bleachers. Let’s just take a look at what’s going on under those bleachers. Under those bleachers where the bleacher wheels were the custodians or whoever’s been re-coating this floor was kind of sweeping the finish under and it’s dirt and rocks all the way along this wall. That’s what it looks.

1:12
This one gives a good idea of how much finish is on this floor. Here’s a pencil that’s just frozen into the finish. There are areas under these bleachers where there’s in excess of a quarter inch of finish underneath these bleachers. We’re gonna go after what with some northern plains point foregrip this is some extremely aggressive abrasive.

1:38
Have to two American 12″ Sanders 24 grit on both of these. Once I get out from under where the old bleachers used to be, I’ll run 24-36 So the leading sander would be 24 Grit trailing standard 36 Grit goal is that the 24 Grit maybe pulls off 75 to 85% of the finish. But that heavy rough grip never touches the woods. And then the 36 pulls it down pretty close to fair would just want to look at the sander. We run a 20 or 25-pound weight pack right over the Toronto.

2:22
The reason these old American Sanders have kind of become the gym for standard is that they are so aggressive there’s such an aggressive Sander over here. This is the pulley side. There’s a bearing in here on this side. There’s also a bearing but so this sander can tolerate a tremendous amount of head pressure on that drone because it’s got bearings on both sides.

2:56
Sometimes people ask Well wouldn’t galaxies Hummels work in a gym they absolutely will. Just not going to be as good on a really nasty old floor like this where there’s literally tons of polyurethane gym finish. As we pull off on this floor.

3:16
We can put the additional weight pack right on top of this drum and it’ll tolerate it. We got a 10 horse, three phase motor. And it will tolerate that weight will aggressively pull that finish and years of combined when everything else is made its way to this floor.

3:40
The galaxy’s Hummels admittedly, they would give a much finer finish to the floor, but we just would have to have worked for hours to get off in the situation like this to get polyurethane off of this floor.

4:00
On top we have power hooked up with a three phase machine. It runs just as well backwards as it does forward. So every time you have to make sure the machine is running in the right direction. I’m going to test that real quick.

4:15
My drums running right way, test the other one

4:22
I was also running the right way. Another thing that person to pay attention to is the bolts that you’re getting because some facilities have high voltage 440 or 480 volts.

4:41
We have these machines run wired to run low voltage to awake to 230 voltage movers and those machines were shown turning 213 to 212 volts on that machine which was right in the approximate area where we want to be.

5:29
So we did about 20 minutes worth of sanding here on this really nasty floor underneath these bleachers.

5:37
It’s amazing. How well these these machines work. Look down at the floor most of that black gunk is gone and this floor is gonna look fabulous but bad is why I love these Americans so much in this particular job. It’s just about an underwater sanding machine that could have done what the saint just did.

6:02
Only 20 minutes. So this is what I wanted. What I was talking about earlier and I just want to demonstrate it on the floor. Get two different sets of tape on the feet. I have 24 grit on this leading chain.

6:18
I got 36 grit paper on his training sheet. And let’s back up here and just look down at the floor. And see that the 20 that 24 grid is taking a lot of the finish but they’re still finished left and then it’s the 36 taking it to bare wood. So at least in the subsequent cots. I’ve got to smooth out the 36 Grit marks in the wood. But I don’t have the 24 print of pickup race of touching the wood for the most part. Okay, so we have spent 11 or 12 hours sanding this gym floor and I want to take a look specifically under where these bleachers used to be and just see how nicely that floor cleaned up.

7:01
All the polyurethane all the black gunk that was caked on one of those bleachers is all gone. And the rest of this floor cleaned up really nicely to

7:13
we have 11 or 12 hours worth of sanding with four different grips. We started as we talked about before was 2436. We then came over again with a 40-50 pass. And now we’re going to do our our final pass with these machines are fine cut. We’ll do a 60-80 pass but before we do that, I’m going to address these drones a piece of 60 grit sandpaper stapled to the floor.

7:44
We’ve got the paper off with these drums.

7:49
I’m actually going to do is put some shims on cams and then tighten the cams up. A theory is that the split drum when you put the shims in there that replicate the paper, it’s going to slightly open that drum up.

8:08
Want to do that? And when we sand the rubber on that sandpaper, get that drum complete cylinder. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish.

8:43
Recognize that in time. This is going to lead up to drop we’re going to take the rubber off the drum but I think that’s a small price to pay for not having a lot of chatter in your floor. And as I said earlier in this video, the split drones do have some propensity for chatter because you almost got that split in the middle. But by ensuring that your bearings are in good shape and dressing these things often specially just before your fine cuts will really cut down on the amount of shatter which you have across the gym floors. I think it’s well worth it. We have found we replaced these drums every year anyway. Because we need it we feel like we should be replacing the bearings every year. It’s just as easy then to go ahead and replace the drum.

9:35
I don’t worry about grinding all the rubber off the ground because we’re gonna use it for one season.

9:41
It’s well worth it to do to get great looking clean up pretty good

10:02
I have a little electrical problem with this sander this little this little receiver on the handle itself went bad.

10:14
The machine was still running but this box was getting hot. I can tell I had to shorten it. When I opened it up.

10:21
A little plug was in poor shape, not many good connections, tear the whole thing apart into it. I do these videos where are we talking about different things that we do. But don’t ever mistake if we don’t have our own challenges every single day.