Belt Sanders for Dummies - The Freelance Files MMCCX

Belt sander

We don't know about you, but we prefer that our questions not be answered by people who, before they googled the topic, were every bit as ignorant as we are... yet that appears to have long been the model by which internet content farms have operated. Be honest, OK? Would you rather have a dentist explaining the effects of plaque than a freelance web designer? a physicist detailing the different flavors of quarks than an out-of-work journalism grad? Sure you would! Instead of depending on some stranger to look it up, if you look it up yourself you can decide what's important to know and what's not. That, unfortunately, is not where WiseGEEK.com shines. No, their freelancers are prone to pretense about their knowledge; just like R. Kayne¹ did in attempting to answer the question, "What is a Belt Sander?" for niche site HomeQuestionsAnswered.com.

Kayne started off on the wrong foot in sentence number one by defining a belt sander as,

"...an electronic hand tool..."

A roll (not belt) of sandpaper

No, R., a belt sander is neither "electronic" nor a "hand tool"; a belt sander is an electric power tool. With such an inauspicious start, we knew right away that Kayne had very likely never even seen a belt sander, much less used one. Well, we have people on staff who have, and they realized quite quickly that R. was a graduate of the MSU² school of freelancing! That was only reinforced by whatever halfwit at WiseGEEK decided to tell the world that the image to the left is "Sandpaper for use with a belt sander" (probably long after Kayne had wandered away from the site). It certainly isn't – sandpaper for belt sanders is pre-formed into a continuous loop – but it's easy to see why the illustration editor thought the image accurate, based on Kayne's claim that,

"...an encased motor... drives a circular belt... Sandpaper, cut in a long strip to fit over the belt, attaches tightly to cover the entire surface of the belt."

Our (much) more knowledgeable staffers pointed out that the belt is the sandpaper, which is powered by rollers at each end of an elliptical loop. In industrial settings, those loops can be quite large, although a consumer-grade belt sander typically has a belt fifteen to twenty-four inches long.

Some of Kayne's other less impressive lines include,

• "Much depends on how a particular sander converts amperage to power" – What does that even mean???
• "The release lever flips up or down to release or secure sandpaper on the belt." – No, dumbass, the release lever secures and releases the belt from the rollers.
• "A sander equipped with variable speeds can be useful for finishing [sic] work." – Nobody uses a belt sander for finish work! You use a finish sander for that...
• "The tool can... quickly sand an entire area without applying significant pressure or manual circular movement." – WTF is this "manual circular movement"? When sanding by hand, you sand in a straight line... with the grain. Maybe R. didn't know that.

R. didn't seem to know an awful lot about sanders in specific and woodworking in general. While his/her/its platitudes (wherever they were harvested from) were generally correct, Kayne's strange notions about how the sander is constructed and how the sandpaper is configured were all we needed to realize that this is another copy-reword-paste job performed by a Dumbass of the Day, someone who lacked the necessary knowledge to know what was wrong with the content. ¹ R, Kayne... "arcane." Get it? ² Making Shit Up

DD - POWER TOOLS