Are these sandpaper any good?

**Acer9103** · 10-23-2011, 02:18 PM

These seem pretty cheap.Thanks.

Wet or Dry Silicon Carbide Sandpaper Sheets

**Acer9103** · 10-26-2011, 10:41 PM

anyone?

**JonMiles** · 10-26-2011, 10:49 PM

Originally Posted by Acer9103

These seem pretty cheap.

You usually get what you pay for. Maybe grab a pack of the 3000g and try them out on some medium scratches to see how uniform the grit is. A review of these would be a great contribution to the forum.

If they are a surprising product and do the job well while having a uniform grit, you could be uncovering a little known brand that gives great results for less money.

I would not know the value of woolite and folex if someone had not tried them on car interiors and mentioned the value on the forum.

**2old2change** · 10-27-2011, 05:42 AM

On the link you provided I also checked out their Mirka and Norton offerings of papers which were both on sale.Nice prices. I have used both of those brands and was pleased.Can't speak to the one you had selected being that I have no experience with that brand. Having used various brands over the years I still favor the Meg's unigrit.

**cacsfalcon** · 10-27-2011, 07:55 AM

These sheet's are manufactured by klingspor,they supply a lot of body shop's ,I have used their product's before ,seem's to be a good quality sand paper. just my 2 cent's though!!!

**Jack Barnhill** · 10-27-2011, 08:07 AM

I haven't used these specific Klingspor papers but I have used some of their other products in woodworking. They were ok but they didn't seem to last as long as Norton or 3M. I used what I bought and went back to Norton.

Mike Phillips · 10-27-2011, 08:10 AM

A simple test is to take a known high quality "finishing" paper like the Nikken brand and do a side-by-side comparison.

Sand a section with #2000 of brand x and then right next to it sand a section with #2000 Nikken.

Now keeping all variables the same, that is,

Compound type
Wool Cutting Pad
Rotary Buffer make and model
Rotary buffer RPM
Number of passes/time
Downward Pressure

Buff the two sections and then inspect to see if one leaves more tracers than the other.

There are a number of things that make a good sand paper here are just two,

Uniform grit particle size
Uniform grit particle distribution over the face of the sheet of paper

If you have both of the above then assuming you use hood hand sanding backing pads and expert technique you will have minimal to zero tracers in the paint.

The less control there is over particle size and distribution of the particles over the face of the paper, the better the chances there are for tracers.

When hand sanding, you don't want any tracers as these are scratches in the paint. The way you would remove tracers is to either spend more time compounding and thus removing more precious paint plus heating the paint up. or re-sand. If you re-sand with the same paper you're in a Catch-22 situation.

Anytime you're sanding paint you want to remove as little paint as possible to reach your goal and have all the sanding marks buff out at the same time.

Of course if you use an aggressive enough compound you can simply grind off a lot of paint really fast and you would never know if you had tracers or not but that's kind of the caveman approach and I'll leave that to others.

A little story...
When I worked as a Trainer for Meguiar's in Oregon, Washington and Idaho I would demonstrate Nikken papers by doing the above test and in one body shop I sanded down the door on a freshly painted Porsche then I let the Painter use the rotary buffer to compound the paint and then inspect the results.

There were so many tracers left on the section where I used his sandpaper of choice that he took the sleeve of sandpaper that he had been using and walked over to the garbage can and through them away.

If you do a lot of sanding, and your goals and expectations are for show car quality work, the you understand the importance of finding a sanding paper or a "finishing"paper that will do the job fast while leaving the most uniform sanding mark pattern possible.

This will,